Category Archives: Bring Me Hope News

BMH Staff Leaves for China

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By the end of this week, almost all of the Bring Me Hope staff will be in Beijing, preparing for the arrival of orphans and volunteers. David informs me that, during the busiest camp week, there will be around 250 people in the complex, including 120 kids, 45 volunteers, 45 translators and 40 staff members. Between now and week 1, which begins July 16, the staff will be preparing the grounds to accommodate that many people.

“We are going to be building a water park, arranging the final details with transportation, testing out the bungee jump and the Great Wall, and getting the pillows fluffed for everyone’s rooms,” David said on Friday, the day before he left for China. “We’ll have a mint under your pillow for you—a Chinese mint that tastes like beans.”

Now that’s something to look forward to.

He said the staff will also be building a stage where our skits will be performed. There are quite a few more people working with Bring Me Hope this year than last, and David said he hopes to maintain the small-group camaraderie that began last year.

“That’s one of my favorite things,” he said. “Last year was amazing because it was a small-group environment and everyone got to know each other really well. The goal is to keep that going this year.”

He said this year’s trip will also be shorter, and he and the rest of the staff will be back in their respective homes on August 14: “It feels like a lot more packed into a smaller amount of time, so … there will be a lot more excitement.”

As the staff (or advance tactical strike team, as I like to call them) prepares for four weeks of summer camps, they will hopefully be able to provide the Bring Me Hope blog with some photos and first-hand accounts of where we will be living, playing and exhausting ourselves later this summer.

— Tom Pfingsten

A definition

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“hope. v. A desire accompanied by confident expectation.”
It is what we have signed up to deliver this summer to a few hundred children in Beijing. Samuel Johnson, who wrote the first English dictionary 350 years ago, defined it even better when he called hope an “expectation of some good.”
We have expectations of the ultimate good. We are privileged to live where we live and have families, but without the spiritual adoption we have already experienced, we would have little more true hope than the orphans we will visit this summer.
I have struggled to understand exactly what we will be trying to do for these kids. I think I won’t really know until I get home afterward, but still, I would like to take with me some accurate expectations. Here is what I came up with.
How hopeless to be an orphan with no Faith and no family, the two strongest potential sources of joy in anyone’s life. Then you are put on a bus and taken to a camp where a bunch of Americans with no clue about you and little experience of Chinese culture are waiting to play with you and show you a good time. That could be fun.
But it could also be more.
It would be too Western to assume that these kids have no hope because of their circumstances. Children are born with a certain reserve of hope and the other virtues. But those reserves must be running dry, and so our job will be to replenish their hope, to leave them with expectations of some good. I would like my buddy to remember me years from now, when the big picture is coming into focus, and wonder, “What would make that white guy travel all the way from America to spend a week with me?” Because there is only one answer that makes sense, and when he stumbles upon it, he will begin to understand what in the world is really worth hoping for.

— Tom Pfingsten