Leila offered the men stools to sit on, but the men preferred to squat on the bamboo mat. Soon Leila and the men were deep in conversation in Lisu while Belle and John sat and observed. Belle could see Leila’s face light up the more they talked. Finally Leila turned to Belle and John and said to them in English, “This is Mark and his two friends. They are from Goo-moo in Burma, a great distance away across the mountains. They have traveled for seven days to get here and have endured snow and much bad weather.”
Belle asked Leila what the men were doing so far from home.
“They have come on behalf of their village to find a teacher who can come and tell them about Jesus. They first heard about Jesus eleven years ago and have been trying to follow His ways. But the people of the village have no books to read and no teacher to tell them more about Jesus. When they learned that the Lisu Christians on the other side of the mountains had both books and teachers to tell them about Jesus, they decided that a group from the village would cross the mountains and find a teacher to come back with them. Two groups tried to cross the mountains and failed, but these three men have succeeded. It was a perilous journey for them, but here they are, and they say they will not return home until they have found a teacher to go with them.”
Chills ran down Belle’s spine as she heard their story. When Belle looked at John, she realized he was feeling the same thing.
Leila let out a sigh and said, “I wish we had a teacher to send with them. Simon could do it, but he will not be back for another month. I told them we have no teacher to send with them right now, and they say they will stay and wait until we do have someone who can go with them. In the meantime they want to study the Bible with Moses.”
With that, the three men stood and followed Moses, the pastor of the church in Pine Mountain Village, out the door.
The following morning Leila announced that she was leaving. With Belle and John in place at Pine Mountain Village, she had decided to make the six-day journey north to Luda to join her husband, who was overseeing the churches in that area. She had asked Moses to watch over them while she was away and act as their interpreter, since he spoke Chinese.
Belle was a little awed by the responsibility Leila had thrust upon her and John, but she was astounded when Leila casually added before she left, “By the way, Moses’ wife, Grace, is expecting a baby any day. I promised to help her, but if the baby comes while I am gone, you’ll have to take over.”
Belle’s stomach lurched. Belle was no nurse, she was sure of that. The sight of blood made her squeamish. “Oh,” she finally replied. “I couldn’t possibly do that. I’ve never seen a baby being born, I have no idea what to do.”
Leila smiled and patted Belle’s hand. “I haven’t had any training either, but you have a daughter, don’t you? You must know what to expect.”
Belle shook her head. “I wasn’t taking notes when Kathryn was born!”
Leila pointed to a couple of books on the shelf. “Take a look at those. They should help you out. Anyway, if something does happen to the baby, don’t be too distressed and don’t feel like it’s your fault. All of Grace’s other babies have been stillborn. Just do your best. It would be wonderful for Moses if he did have one live child, though.”
Belle stood dumbfounded as Leila kissed her good-bye on the cheek and set off with two guides. What have I gotten myself into? Belle wondered as she watched Leila head off down the trail.
Two days later, when Leila was too far along the trail to be called back, Grace went into labor. Belle pored over the medical textbooks to try to discover what she should do. The books were exactly like the frightening ones Nurse Ling had brought with her when she came to deliver Kathryn. The pictures still made Belle squirm as she read.
Grace’s labor went on all day and through the night, and then all the second day. By that evening Moses and Belle were both exhausted.
“What if the baby never comes?” Moses asked despondently.
Belle looked at the medical books once again, though she already knew they did not offer any advice on how to speed up a birth. She closed her eyes and prayed for strength to go on, wishing that the nearest doctor were closer than two weeks’ journey away.
Grace’s fate and the fate of her baby were in Belle’s and God’s hands, and Belle prayed fervently for wisdom to know what to do. Then somewhere in the back of her mind she recalled reading that quinine could be used to speed up labor. Or had she? The more Belle thought about it, the less sure she was that she’d actually read that fact. Yet she did have quinine in her medical supplies. Should she give Grace some of it?
She talked to Moses about her notion, and they both prayed for God’s direction.
“Let’s go ahead,” Moses said when they were done praying.
“I feel that God is telling us to do that too,” Belle replied. “So since we both agree, I will give her quinine.”
With trembling hands Belle fed Grace a two-grain pill of quinine and waited. Nothing happened, so she returned to her hut to rest. “Come and get me if anything changes,” she told Moses as she left.
It was midnight when Moses knocked on the side of the house. “Please, you must come,” he blurted.
Belle jumped to her feet. She had been sleeping in her clothes, and she ran out the door and up the hill after Moses. When she arrived in the dimly lit hut, she shined her flashlight on Grace, just in time to see a newborn baby slip out. The baby did not make a sound.
“It’s dead, like the others,” Moses wailed.
Belle’s heart lurched. Had she killed the child with the quinine?
“Waaa!” The cry rose from the pile of rags on the floor. Belle scooped up the baby. It was a girl, and she was very much alive.
Belle cut the umbilical cord while Moses let out a whoop of joy. When she was done, Moses took the child from Belle and thanked God for giving him a live baby at last. Belle let out her own prayer of thanks. The experience was one she never wanted to repeat.
Baby Esther, as Moses and Grace named their daughter, grew stronger each day, and Moses took to carrying her everywhere, showing her off to anyone who would take the time to look at the little bundle in his arms.
The rest of the month with the Lisu at Pine Mountain Village flew by, and, much to Belle’s relief, no more medical dramas took place. During their month there Belle and John were able to witness a baptism. Christians from the local church gathered at a small mountain pool located near Pine Mountain Village. Belle watched as the church deacons lined up along one side of the pool. Members of the congregation stood together behind the deacons and sang hymns while the candidates for baptism waited on the other side of the pool dressed in thin clothes. Finally Moses entered the frigid water of the mountain pool and began the baptism. One at a time a candidate would enter the water, and Moses would dip the person below the surface. Then, dripping wet and usually shivering, each person would climb out on the opposite side of the pool and shake the hand of each deacon before rushing to a makeshift shelter to put on warm, dry clothes.
At first Belle had been puzzled by the Lisu Christians’ desire to continually shake hands with each other. Then she learned that shaking hands was an important sign of Christian fellowship among the Lisu. Apparently, when James first came and evangelized the Lisu, the people had noted his English penchant for shaking hands and had taken the gesture to have some Christian meaning. Since that time, Lisu Christians shook hands regularly.
Witnessing the baptism, along with the openness among the Lisu people to hear the gospel, excited Belle. How different the Lisu were from the Chinese. Belle could never imagine three Chinese men walking across the mountains for days for the sole purpose of bringing a Christian teacher back to their village to explain the gospel to them more fully. Evangelizing among the Chinese was so much more difficult than evangelizing among the Lisu.
As their month in Pine Mountain Village drew to a close, Belle began to grow anxious. As much as she would have loved to stay longer in Lisuland, she had promised the two women looking after Kathryn that she would not stay longer than a month, and now that time was up. However, John had not been able to make much progress in dealing with the opium situation. One of the warlords was still threatening to destroy the Christian churches throughout the territory if church members did not grow opium for him, as they were required to do. And he was ordering those who refused to grow the opium to pay twice the amount of tax they owed him. John had talked to many people about the state of affairs, but the situation remained unresolved. As a result, John felt that he should stay on in Pine Mountain Village to brief Leila when she finally returned.
In the end the couple decided that Belle should return with a local escort while John stayed another month or so with the Lisu. Belle was relieved to hear that on the way back they would be following a slightly more direct route through many tiny towns. Ma Fu-yin, one of Belle’s escorts, told Belle that she was the only white woman who had ever traveled that trail. Belle could believe it. As they moved along, every time they stopped for the night, a crowd of onlookers would gather around Belle, poking at her and trying to get her to speak English.
As she trekked up and down the mountains on the trip back, Belle had plenty of time to think about going and living among the Lisu. Was it really what God had called her to do? It would be much harder living in the mountains with the Lisu than on the plains and in the valleys of China where there were many markets and an abundance of produce to buy. There were few markets in which to buy food among the Lisu. Vegetables and corn had to be coaxed to grow out of the rocky ground, and the Cookes kept hens that needed constant attention in order to produce eggs. As well, the Lisu homes had no furniture beyond a few woven baskets to hold food and a communal plank that everyone used to eat from, and no one washed. Water had to be carried from a well, both for drinking and for the laborious job of washing clothing by hand. There was also the constant threat of falling down the mountainside or having part of the mountainside come loose and fall on you!
In the end, however, all these things paled away when Belle remembered the Lisu Christians she had met. There was Moses, who had recently headed north to help Allyn Cooke, leaving behind the pride of his life, his newborn daughter Esther. There was Me-do-me-pa, who had suffered at the hands of the warlord for his faith and yet remained steadfast and joyful in that faith and was an inspiration to others. And there were the three Flowery Lisu men who had hiked for days from Burma to reach Pine Mountain Village and refused to leave until someone went with them to teach the people of their village about Jesus.
Deep in her heart Belle knew that she had found her life’s calling. With Christians as devout as those she had met in and around Pine Mountain Village, she would count it a privilege to spend the rest of her life teaching them more about God’s ways. Now all she had to do was convince James that she was physically strong enough for the challenge of life among the Lisu.
Chapter 12
Back to Pine Mountain
Nearly two months later, John arrived back at their mission house at Old Market in the Yungping Valley. Soon after his return from the Lisu, a flow of letters began between the Kuhns and James Fraser. James had recently married a fellow missionary named Roxie. The new couple were now expecting their first child.
John and Belle wrote back with their congratulations and news that John had recently been sick with amoebic dysentery and had also undergone a hernia operation under primitive conditions in Tali.
Finally, in November 1934, John and Belle received permission to relocate to Lisuland to take over the work Leila had been overseeing. “Not permanently,” James wrote. “Just for two years until your furlough, and then we will see where you are needed after that.”
