Every day of the RSBS was a new adventure for Belle, who loved getting to know the students in the school. Besides Job, there was Aristarchus, who had left a job that paid him sixty dollars a year to attend the Bible school. And twenty-three-year-old Silas, who seemed to have great difficulty remembering his lessons in class but could talk in great detail about minor points of doctrine. Not to mention twenty-two-year-old Nathanael, who had difficulty reading and writing but could preach sermons that kept people riveted.
Homay blossomed in the school. She seemed to get along particularly well with Thomas, one of the other students. It excited Belle to see Homay’s shining eyes and bright smile when she was with him, especially after the death of her fiancé, Joseph.
Belle also faced some interesting teaching challenges. Since the Lisu language had no word for conscience, it took some creative explaining for her to get the concept of a conscience across to her students. Neither were there Lisu words for holiness and humility, concepts that took some explaining. Belle found that she had to spend a lot of time teaching the students not to be so preoccupied with the Lisu cultural practice of appeasing demons but to instead focus on God—Wu-sa—and worship Him, because He was greater that any demon. She also spent time explaining the difference between law and grace.
Nonetheless, Belle persisted, and at the end of three months, a closing ceremony was held for the RSBS in the church at Oak Flat. The students dressed in their best clothes and placed a flower in a buttonhole. One of the students was chosen to preach during the closing ceremony, while the others each stood and gave a five-minute testimony. Another student, Junia, couldn’t decide what was the best combination of clothes to wear to the ceremony, so he simply put on all his clothes. By the time he rose to give his five-minute testimony he was sweating profusely, which caused the other students to laugh. Lots of singing was featured in the service as the students showed off all the choruses and hymns they had learned. At the end of the ceremony, each student was given a certificate to signify that he or she had successfully completed the RSBS.
Once the Rainy Season Bible School was over, Belle made a list of ideas to incorporate the following year. Also, immediately following the completion of the school, Homay and Thomas were married, much to Belle’s delight. Belle thought they made a fine couple.
“There are Lisu here who need to hear the gospel in their own language,” read the letter John and Belle received just as the Bible school was drawing to a close. The letter was from a missionary in the Yongpeh, a tribal area east of the Yangtse River gorge, about a two-week journey from Oak Flat. The missionary asked the Kuhns if they could send two Lisu evangelists to work among the Lisu of the Yongpeh. John and Belle presented the request to the Oak Flat church elders, who prayed over it and eventually decided to send Aristarchus and Secondus, who had both just finished RSBS, to Yongpeh.
Once the two young men had set out on the journey to Yongpeh, Belle turned her attention to putting her experiences among the Lisu into book form. She tried to fit some typing time in each day, and her manuscript, titled Precious Things of the Lasting Hills, came together easily. Belle was able to use copies of her many prayer letters home to help fill in the details.
Having completed a draft of the manuscript, Belle then focused on the next project—a trip across the mountains to Goo-moo, Burma, to support the local Christian work there. Preparations for the trip were made. Thomas and Homay, Lucius (one of the students from the RSBS), and seven other Christian men (a guide, an interpreter, a cook, a mule boy, and three carriers) would accompany John and Belle on the journey. They planned to set off for Goo-moo in early October at the end of the rainy season.
Just before the group set out on the trip, a messenger arrived with sad news: James Fraser had died of malaria in Paoshan on September 25. Belle could scarcely believe what she was hearing. There was no one else in the world who understood their work among the Lisu and could give her and John sound advice. Belle’s heart went out to James’s widow, Roxie, and their three young daughters, and she immediately wrote a letter of condolence to Roxie Fraser.
For Belle, James not only had been the person who introduced her to the plight of the Lisu people fourteen year before at The Firs in Bellingham, Washington, but over the intervening years had also been an adviser and spiritual mentor to her. She would miss him deeply. In her diary, after hearing of James’s death, she wrote:
There was no one else on earth who had such a complete knowledge of the details of our problems and so no one could share so perfectly in our joys and sorrows…. John and I have, perforce, to enter an entirely new epoch of our lives, for life can never again be quite the same without him.
Upon hearing of James’s death, the Lisu Christians went into mourning. In their grief they banded together and collected the sum of twenty dollars in silver to pay for the missionary’s burial in Paoshan. A delegation of Lisu then made its way to Paoshan to deliver the money and attend James’s memorial service. Belle longed to go with them and pay her last respects to her friend and mentor, but the plans for the trip to Goo-moo were firmly in place, and she and John would be leaving shortly on the journey.
As far as Belle was concerned, one positive thing came out of James’s unexpected death. The fighting in China was growing worse by the day, and James had been the man who best understood how the fighting affected the various CIM missionary opportunities and postings throughout the region. Now that he was gone, the leaders of CIM decided that it would be wise to leave all the missionaries posted where James had placed them. As a result, John and Isobel Kuhn’s temporary posting among the Lisu at Oak Flat became permanent. It was not quite how Belle would have liked their permanent posting among the Lisu to have occurred. Nonetheless, she accepted the news with a grateful heart.
Finally the missionaries set out on the journey to Goo-moo. Belle was aware that the journey would be arduous, yet she was excited to be on her way. She thought back to her first trip to Lisuland, four years before, and how the three young men from Goo-moo had arrived at Leila Cooke’s door begging for a teacher to go back with them to their village in Burma and teach them more about Jesus. Over the years a number of Lisu evangelists had gone to Goo-moo in answer to the need, and now Belle would get to see firsthand the results of their labor.
The first day of the trip was spent descending the mountain range they lived on, crossing the river, and then climbing the next range. When they made camp that night on the top on the next range of mountains, Belle could look back across the valley and see the roof of their bamboo house at Oak Flat. The next day they traveled on, crossing more mountain ridges, and they did the same the following day. Then they began to climb eleven thousand feet up to Pien-Ma Pass, the gateway to Burma. As they reached the pass late in the afternoon and crossed the border, Belle took in the sight. Behind her, in China, the mountains stretched out as far as she could see, as did the mountains in Burma which lay in front of her. They hurried down the other side of Pien-Ma Pass, hoping to get as far down the mountain as possible before darkness descended. When the darkness did finally envelop them, they camped for the night beside a deserted British fort.
The weather in Burma was decidedly warmer, and the pine trees that clung to the mountains on the Chinese side of the border gave way to lush jungle. For the next three days the group traveled on, making their way through lush valleys festooned with orchids and with waterfalls that seemed to drop from heaven to the valley floor. Belle was entranced by the beauty around her, though the journey on this side of the mountains was not without its difficulties. Leeches were everywhere underfoot, looking for bare skin to latch on to, and Belle notice a number of large snakes slither off the trail in front of them.
Finally, late in the afternoon they reached the last river to cross before getting to Goo-moo. To get over this river they had to float in a flimsy, two-person raft bound together with strips of bark. By the time darkness fell over the river only half the group had made it across in the raft. Once it was dark, the men rowing the raft refused to go back for those who had not yet made it across. They explained that they might hit a submerged rock and be swept away in the fast-flowing current. However, when a bright full moon emerged two hours later, the rowers agreed to continue ferrying the rest of the group across. Belle watched as the raft returned, bringing the mules across the river. The terrified animals were tied to the raft by their tails, and the men guiding the raft reached out and held their heads above water as they swam alongside the raft. Belle had never seen mules so glad to reach the other side of a river.
When everyone was safely across, it was time to make their way to Goo-moo, which sat on the mountainside two thousand feet above them. The trail that led from the river up the side of the mountain was so steep that Belle could not ride her mule, Jasper, up it. Instead, she walked behind Jasper, holding his tail and allowing him to pull her up the mountain. In the dark she had no idea where she was stepping. She just followed Jasper one step at a time, all the while hoping that no big snakes were lurking on the trail in the dark.
Shortly after midnight, the group made it to Goo-moo, where the local Christians were eagerly awaiting their arrival. When they got to the village, there was, as usual, a lot of handshaking.
The people of the village had built a bamboo hut with a banana-leaf roof for John and Belle to sleep in. Belle was grateful to crawl into bed to sleep that night.
For the next several weeks, John and Belle stayed in the Goo-moo area, teaching the local Christians and leading them in singing in the small, white chapel they had built in the village. They also preached in outlying villages where people had not yet heard the gospel.
All too soon, however, it was time for the missionaries to head back across the mountains to Oak Flat. The local Lisu Christians had grown very fond of Homay and Thomas, and they begged the Kuhns to leave the couple behind in the village for six months so that they could learn more from the Bible. John and Belle agreed, and Homay and Thomas moved into the bamboo hut. The remainder of the group arrived back in Oak Flat just in time to help plan the Christmas festivities.
Waiting for John and Belle upon their arrival back was a letter from Aristarchus and Secondus in Yongpeh. What an amazing tale their letter told! The two of them had made contact with the Lisu in the area. They had borrowed a house in one village and held regular Christian services in it. They had also gone to other Lisu villages throughout the area and preached in them. As a result of their effort, thirty-five families, about two hundred Lisu in all, had become Christians.
The men’s report excited Belle. Here were two students from the RSBS preaching the gospel to people who had never heard it before and seeing many converts. The result was even more than Belle had hoped for when she first conceived of the Bible school.
The letter also contained more exciting news. Aristarchus and Secondus had made contact with the Lolo tribe. Belle knew of the tribe. It had a fearsome reputation throughout the Yongpeh district. About one hundred thousand Lolo, an aggressive people who often kidnapped Chinese and Lisu alike and held them for ransom, were living in the area. Since 1928, James Fraser had prayed for the Lolo and searched for a way for CIM missionaries to enter their territory and share the gospel with them. And now two young men from the RSBS had made that first contact and were taking tentative steps toward doing that very thing. Aristarchus and Secondus asked that they be allowed to stay longer in the Yongpeh district to continue the work they had begun. John and Belle sent back a letter giving an unqualified yes to the men’s request.
