Hope in Mandarin

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I have not even completely grasped Spanish from my days in community college, with its irregular verbs and proper plural tense, and here I am trying to memorize the difference between “mother” and “horse” in Chinese – a subtle difference, it turns out, indicated not by what you say, but how you say it, the inflection. It’s like being married, when your words often mean less than how they sound. So it should be no surprise that the music in our voices is what truly matters when we try to speak Mandarin.

I recently began looking for Web sites with good insight into learning to speak basic Chinese. I found a few, and will continue searching, as I feel totally lost when I try to say anything I should know how to say before we head to Beijing. If anyone has a favorite online source of Mandarin wisdom, please send us a link. Here are a few to start with.

Peter Bower, a Bring Me Hope staff member who is learning to speak Chinese more seriously than most of the rest of us, directed me to what looks like the best single resource for the beginning Mandarin speaker, a Web site that helps you sound out Chinese words using the English alphabet. This system is called “Pinyin.”

Wikipedia has a decent spoken Chinese page that covers a lot of background, such as dialects. Much of the info here will not be useful to the Bring Me Hope summer traveler, but some will.

I also found what appears to be a comprehensive and easy-to-use Chinese-English dictionary. There may be a better one out there, but for now, this one will serve our purposes.

You can download flash cards and other helpful resources at a fourth site, www.mandarintools.com. This site is not as easy to navigate as the others, but it also has a dictionary and some other useful stuff.

— Tom Pfingsten

Night Walking

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It’s not often that you see fifty people walking down Main Avenue in Fallbrook on a Saturday night, let alone handing out glowing green bracelets and taking pictures of each other. I imagine the scene was similar in every community around the globe where Bring Me Hope supporters gathered to raise money during the night walk on Saturday. That the cause has drawn such far-flung support during its two years of existence is a testimony to the dedication of its staff, the passion of those who volunteer and, above all, the eternal significance of what is being done in the lives of Chinese orphans.

The night walk raised $15,000 in donations, motivated about 300 volunteers to hit the streets in 12 states and three countries, and paid for 60 orphans to attend camp this summer. (Of course, that is just the number that were paid for by this weekend’s fundraiser, not the total number of kids who will be at the camps.) Volunteers walked in the U.S. and Australia while a group of orphans walked in China. There was even a troupe of flight attendants walking the aisles of a plane bound for the Middle East, Bring Me Hope Director David Bolt said during the conference call preceding the walk, although the details of how he convinced them to participate in mid-air are still a mystery.

Following are some images from the May 19 night walk, taken by myself and Michael Chan, who designed this blog.

Bring Me Hope in the News…in Maine

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A news station in Maine ran a feature story about a trio of mothers who have adopted Chinese babies and were taking part in Saturday’s Night Walk. It was a little more than two minutes long — a great piece illustrating what Bring Me Hope is about — but the station has already replaced it on its Web site with a more recent broadcast.

Love for children is universal, and it is encouraging to see people in the opposite corner of the U.S. taking up the same cause.

— Tom Pfingsten