The Little Farms That Could

Angela Lu Fulton

Whether drying seeds with computer fans or fashioning water filters from barrels, a global agriculture ministry combats poverty with improvisation.

Manali Dutta, an intern at ECHO Asia Impact Center in Chiang Mai, Thailand, conducts germination tests with seeds from the seed bank.

Photo by Tim Barker

In the fight against world hunger, Patrick Trail sees weapons everywhere. A bike pump, for instance.

Farmers in the jungles of Vietnam or the floodplains of Cambodia may not have money to buy a vacuum-sealing machine, which they could use to preserve seeds and store them for future planting. So Trail, who leads the ECHO Asia Impact Center in Thailand, found ways to improvise. He took apart a bicycle pump and rebuilt it to suck air rather than blow it. Then, with a glass jar and a piece of tape, he used the pump to remove oxygen and moisture from a handful of seeds.

And just like that: dirt-cheap seed saving.

In fact, Trail and his coworkers have found that across locations and with different seed varieties, the bike pump works better than most vacuum sealers, which cost hundreds of times as much. Contrary to popular belief, “cheap can be good too,” he said.

A large majority of people in Southeast Asia live in rural areas, where agriculture is the dominant livelihood. But farming is getting more difficult. Rising energy prices and limited access to credit are hitting farmers at the same time that climate change is making temperatures and rainfall more volatile. Farming smarter, in Asia and elsewhere, is key.

On a seven-acre farm outside of the city of Chiang Mai, staff are experimenting with ways to turn waste into resources. Some of the experiments are stunning in their simplicity: A ballooning black plastic tarp traps gases released by decomposing pig manure, and a pipe transports the gas to heat pig feed. Black soldier flies eat food scraps and leave behind their grub-like larvae, which is harvested as chicken food.

Photo by Tim Barker

Other projects are more technical: Workers tinker in the kitchen to find tasty ways to cook plants like the leafy chaya and Spanish needle, which are edible and nutritious but not generally viewed as food in Asia. They dry seeds in a cabinet using four light bulbs and a cheap computer fan. They heat wood chips and plant scraps in a metal barrel to make biochar, a charcoal used to filter water.

“You got all these resources available, but people might just not know, with a few simple techniques, how to take advantage of them,” Trail said. “We’re all about turning waste into value.”

The farm in Thailand is one of three such sites around the world operated by ECHO, a Florida-based organization that shares its knowledge, research, and seeds with missionaries, development workers, and local pastors. (The idea of using a bicycle pump for a vacuum, for example, didn’t originate with ECHO, but the organization has tested and refined it for use in specific contexts.)

ECHO and its network in Asia exist to improve small-scale farming in impoverished rural areas. In addition to research and training, ECHO maintains a seed bank for underutilized and hard-to-find seeds that thrive in Asia, hoping to ensure farmers have access to them for generations.

For 40 years, the Christian organization has been providing resources for frontline agricultural workers. Especially as the climate warms and governments close their doors to missionaries, ECHO sees its role as increasingly important for ministry across the globe. Christians with expertise in sustainable farming are often welcomed where traditional missionaries are not.

“There’s a growing demand for holistic approaches,” Trail said. “We’ve seen pastors come to us saying, ‘We are planting a church to share the gospel, but of course we’re going to help our neighbors with food insecurity [because] they’re hungry and their children are malnourished. Jesus met people’s physical needs, so why wouldn’t we?’”

Photo by Tim Barker

ECHO’s original vision was small. In the 1970s, American businessman Richard Dugger went on a mission trip to Haiti and returned home to Indianapolis overwhelmed by the poverty and need he saw. He founded the Educational Concerns for Haiti Organization (ECHO) to find long-term solutions to food scarcity in Haiti.

In 1981, Martin Price became ECHO’s first executive director and broadened the organization’s focus from Haiti to the entire world. He emphasized agricultural research, training, and providing seeds for groups already in the field: agricultural missionaries, Peace Corps officers, and Christian nonprofit groups like World Vision. The H in ECHO was switched to stand for “hunger.”

During Martin’s tenure, missionaries sent him questions by mail, and he responded with hand-typed suggestions, according to Abram Bicksler, the group’s president and CEO today. Martin kept in touch with a growing network through long-distance calls and trips to visit projects.

“Back in the day before Google, we served as the Google for sustainable agriculture for the developing world,” Bicksler said. “Even to this day we get a lot of requests; it’s just moved online.”

ECHO purchased a 7.5-acre demonstration farm in Fort Myers, Florida, in 1991, where researchers experiment with best practices. ECHO began its first seed bank there. Today the farm is 57 acres with training facilities, administrative buildings, and a bookstore. About 10,000 visitors tour the farm each year.

The advent of the internet allowed ECHO to grow its global agricultural network. In the mid-1990s, ECHO began its first international conference, now held annually. Its ranks swelled with not only missionaries, but also indigenous pastors, aid and development workers, and environmental academics. Roughly a quarter of ECHO’s network today are non-Christian organizations.

“We invite anyone to come to our conference, but really we see this as a gospel issue,” Bicksler said. “Our example is Jesus, who ministered through holistic, spiritual, and social healing.”

Through an online community, ECHO members find resources and exchange knowledge. In one recent thread, someone from Kenya asked for suggestions on dealing with drought. Another member recommended water harvesting trenches. A few weeks later the Kenyan farmer posted a photo of a water pool she’d captured using his technique.

ECHO opened its first global farm in Chiang Mai in 2009. In the following years, it opened farms in Tanzania and Burkina Faso to contextualize the organization’s practices and ideas for Africa. Like the farm in Florida, the overseas centers are repositories of information and laboratories for best practices.

Along the way, ECHO’s work in the development community has led some people to Jesus. When Manali Dutta from Calcutta, India, arrived at the ECHO conference last October, she immediately felt drawn to the people at ECHO. “I felt like I’m one of them, like a part of the family, even though I just met them,” she said.

She grew up in a Hindu home but never felt connected to her family’s faith. Instead, Dutta always sensed someone was protecting her, like hands waiting to catch her if she fell. When she shared this with a conference attendee, he told her: “Do you know what, you are actually talking about the Bible.”

As they discussed the gospel, Dutta felt like she finally found what she had been looking for.

Dutta traveled to the Chiang Mai farm for a three-month internship, where she cared for the farm and the seeds, putting to use her master’s degree in zoology and at the same time learning more about her new faith. “Wow, it feels so joyful, it gives so much inner peace,” Dutta said. “I feel like I’m not alone, I know God is always there for me.”

Under the sweltering mid-February sun, Trail walks me through row upon row of plants growing in raised beds—stalks of quinoa and sesame, green jack bean and tobacco (for natural pest control), brilliant red amaranth and drooping calabash gourds. Some plants have to be protected by strips of shade cloth. Others are watered by plastic water jugs that workers peppered with holes and buried in the soil, filling them with water to drip-feed certain beds.

Trail points to green tomatoes hanging heavy on the vine, noting that, while the fruit would be ready to harvest in two weeks, he plans to keep them on the vine another six. Tomatoes left to rot on the vine will leave mature seeds—perfect for collecting and saving in the seed bank.

Seed saving works like this: ECHO staff cut up the overripe tomatoes, scooping out the seeds and soaking them overnight. The seeds ferment, breaking down the mucilage, a gelatin-like protective coating. Workers rub away that outer pulp with a screen, then dry the seeds in the sun or an open-air rack. Dry seeds are vacuum sealed and stored in a chilled, insulated seed bank.

Every seed requires different techniques: some plants, like lettuce, produce thousands of seeds. Others, like jack bean, only have about eight per pod.

The seed bank is the centerpiece of the Chiang Mai farm. It houses around 200 varieties of seeds, most of which produce food for humans or livestock or can be used as cover crops or natural pesticides. ECHO collects and exchanges seeds with local farmers, as well as with partners across ECHO’s networks, said Rattakarn Arttawutikun, the farm’s agricultural operations manager.

ECHO also trains its local partners to save and store seeds, because only local communities can ultimately ensure the stability of future crops. (And ultimately, sustainable farming practices are only useful if communities choose to adopt them.) Country-specific seed banks are becoming more important, Trail says, as Southeast Asian countries tighten restrictions on bringing seeds across borders.

“If [farmers] know how to save, how to clean well, how to dry well, they will be able to save the seed longer,” Arttawutikun said. The seeds in ECHO’s seed bank last between three and ten years. “With our technique, it’s available a whole life,” she said. So “the next generation, they don’t have to worry about that.”

The biggest barrier to creating seed banks in impoverished areas is cost. In humid, hot climates, it’s difficult to keep seeds cool and dry. ECHO Asia’s seed bank occupies an insulated, climate-controlled room, chilled by an air conditioner to a steady 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Inside, shelves are lined with plastic bins noting the seed names and filled with vacuum-sealed bags of seeds. Should the electricity go out, the farm has a backup generator. And should a fire or other disaster destroy the seed bank, there are more seeds in a deep freezer. Every year, ECHO staff does germination tests to make sure seeds remain viable.

ECHO’s setup, however, is too expensive for farmers in places like rural Laos. So ECHO experiments with lower-cost storage designs, such as structures built from earth-filled bags and insulated with sawdust or rice hulls to keep heat and humidity out.

To help disseminate this kind of knowledge, ECHO partners with local pastors who are farmers themselves, who have congregations made up of farmers, or who are trying to reach out to farmers. The thinking is that communities benefit by learning about nutritious new crops or natural ways to control pests, and pastors can build trust by helping families improve their livelihood.

By using the Chiang Mai farm as a resource center, “We have this opportunity to take on the risk,” Trail said. “Farmers just don’t have much margin. It’s risky to try anything new. So one of the benefits is that [we can] just try and fail and try and fail until we find things that work.”

On the day I visited ECHO farm in early 2024, 25 people from eight countries—including Thailand, Myanmar, India, and the United States—were finishing up a weeklong course on tropical agriculture and development. Most of the participants had little to no farming background.

One worked at a children’s home in Myanmar and had come to learn how to build a garden to feed the children. Another was a missionary who grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania and planned to do community development work in northern Laos. “We’re getting really excited about [taking] a holistic approach,” he said, requesting his name not be used because of the Lao government’s restrictions on missionaries. “I believe the community has resources and we want to help people value that and use that.”

On the last afternoon of the course, students sat in a classroom learning about four-barrel water filtration systems. The training to build these systems is ECHO Asia’s most popular class.

After Myanmar’s coup in 2021, many of ECHO’s partners working with displaced people along the Thailand-Myanmar border urgently needed low-cost water filtration. Trail had heard about a four-barrel system that only required plastic trash cans, pipes, rocks, charcoal, and sand. The team did some research and tried to build one.

Once they found a design that worked, they shared it. They held workshops on how to build the system. Now dozens of these water filtration systems—which fit well in a school or a church—are in use.

Participants Albert “Jelly” Molsom and her husband, Abel Debbarma, said they hope to take what they learn in the course to a Christian retreat center they help run in southeastern India. They want to build a demonstration farm where they can grow food to feed guests, and they want to train locals to set up backyard gardens and raise small livestock. Molsom’s parents are farmers, but “everything is new for us,” she said, gesturing to the water filtration system.

A Singaporean missionary to Chiang Mai named Philip, who requested his last name not be used, came to the course with three colleagues. His specialty is biblical counseling, but he also wanted to incorporate some community development into his work.

The Thai church Philip partners with told him it had a training center 45 minutes outside the city with plenty of land to build a farm. The only problem: Philip is from urban Singapore, with very little experience in agriculture. “We needed something more systematic, and this course fit,” he said. “It’s better than learning from YouTube or whatever source. Now we have a proper way to learn.”

Philip said the training taught him not just what to do, but why. “If we have a good harvest, we share it with the community,” he said. “If we have good seeds, we can share it with the community. It helps to build trust and build relationships and that presents the opportunity to share the gospel.”

Peter Jan de Vries, an environmental consultant for the Christian nonprofit SIL International, came to ECHO’s farm to network and learn more about the challenges facing farmers in the region. After the training, he traveled to Indonesia to teach Christians how the Bible relates to farming and to demonstrate building the water filtration system.

What ECHO is doing, de Vries said, “is the practical implementation of the mustard seed—that you have to start with the small farmers. You’re not doing it to immediately change the world, but you start changing [it] through people who have no one else to take care of them.”

He added: “And it really supports the growth of God’s kingdom because, if you help people where they are, where their challenges are, then they are also very open. [They wonder] Hey, why are you doing this instead of just selling a product? You’re trying to help us. That is the testimony in itself.”

Angela Lu Fulton is CT’s Southeast Asia editor. She reported this story from Chiang Mai, Thailand.

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Church Life

Stealing Death’s Sting

Eva Chou

As China’s population ages, few receive end-of-life care. Christians are helping the elderly face death with hope.

Illustration by Xinyue Chen

Part I

When a 70-year-old man infected with anthrax bacteria asked church members to visit him, Xi Feng Zhao joined, even though for the past week he’d suffered his own bout of nerve pain with sleepless nights. He and the other church caregivers arrived to find a man wracked with pain. They had to cover their noses. Some vomited because of the foul odor.

Zhao, known to many as Brother Faithful, didn’t hesitate to go to the patient’s bed. He was overcome to realize that the pain he had suffered for the past seven days and nights was preparing him to care for the person in front of him.

The man with anthrax was the director of the anticorruption bureau in Harbin, an industrial city of nearly 10 million people in China’s northeast. He had a reputation for strict integrity and impartiality. He did not know how he contracted the disease but, after he fell ill, many Christian lay people and pastors visited him and urged him to come to faith in Christ. But when sin was mentioned, he could not admit he was a sinner, not someone like those he had caught in his work.

But the day Zhao visited, something broke. The director surrendered to God’s holiness and sovereignty.

The two men held hands and shared each other’s pain. Zhao started to sing hymns. The man cried. More surprising, he started to pray and to confess that he was a sinner needing God’s forgiveness. One half of his face, festering from infection, grew more distorted as he cried, yet the other half could not hide the joy of release. Zhao held tight his hand and prayed for him. Both men were filled with peace and joy, even as they shared the man’s highly contagious tears and saliva.

Within a week, the director was dead.

Photos courtesy of Brother Faithful and Pastor Li

In China, end-of-life care is still developing, and spiritual care is often left out. Nurses and doctors who see the hospital as a field of physical healing may fail to see that a patient’s spiritual needs cannot be met by healing the body.

Experts say China’s once-surging population is aging and shrinking. By mid-century it will have up to 200 million fewer people, while the median age will climb from 38 years old to 50. China also has the world’s highest number of patients with terminal cancer, with 6,000 deaths per day from cancer, according to the 2020 World Cancer Report.

At the same time, the current trend of one-man authoritarian rule makes reforms to health care systems challenging and elder care a low priority for most officials. Those hardships are acute in China’s rural areas, where the elderly receive pensions that are just a fraction of what the elderly in urban areas receive.

Enter Christian groups like Zhao’s and the Golden Apple Life Care Team, which began in 2017 as a ministry to China’s rapidly aging population and to the critically ill.

The deepest problem triggered by illness, according to Golden Apple founder Pastor Li, is the loss of the value and meaning of life. “These patients have psychological anxiety and despair in addition to physical pain. Only when a person has a correct understanding of life can he see the value and meaning of life and thus complete his farewell on earth calmly and peacefully. Only when he is filled with love can he have hope instead of despair.”

As the founder of the Golden Apple Life Care Team, Li observed through his years of exploration and practice that for a seriously ill patient, medical care must be combined with spiritual care for healing to happen. The team’s track record has drawn attention from wider clinical circles.

In 2018, Liu Jin, a Beijing-based psychological counselor with a PhD in sociology, grew frustrated as she visited critically ill patients. Often she found herself wrapped up in their despair, dragged with them to the edge of death’s abyss. She joined her teammates on patient visits in silence, only to return to her office and cry. In the midst of this helplessness and pain, she began to understand that God had brought her into critical care ministry not to use her talents and abilities, but to fulfill her own life.

Liu says she could not face the truth of death if God had not led her to a wide place and given her the power of the Holy Spirit. She also learned from Li and his Golden Apple care team about the simple gift of care.

“Are you all right?” Li would gently ask, drawing near to a patient. And the patients’ faces, which were gray and stiff, blossomed into expression, some eyes red with tears. To them, Li is a messenger of love.

With such examples, Liu said, “God has given me a true knowledge of life and death through serving the flesh that is weak and broken . … My life grows in patience and tolerance, and I see more and more the meaning and value of service itself.”

Zhao, for all his decades of critical care ministry, has never received formal theological training or a day’s salary from the work. Though he dropped out of elementary school, he seized the opportunities created by China’s economic reforms and opening in the 1990s to become a wealthy businessman. But he squandered his money with eating, drinking, gambling, and chasing women, he says. He was a “society big brother” with bodyguards in front and behind him during the day—but at night he couldn’t sleep because of the emptiness in his heart.

During those years his Christian mother and sister prayed for him. He found a church where a man greeted him with, “Brother, who are you looking for?” Brother Faithful was immediately in tears, discovering he believed in the gospel. That day he went from being a “big brother” in society to a brother in Christ.

He began reading the Bible with thirst and hunger every day. But the turn of his life was greeted by cursing from his wife and abandonment by his friends. That experience helps him, he says, to stand firm in care ministry when doctors and nurses want to throw him out and patients are indifferent.

“Where the gospel is to break through, there are bound to be forces of darkness that stand in the way. God allows persecution to come in order that our faith, having been tried, may truly persist,” Faithful says.

Scolded on a first visit to see a patient, he has learned to come back the next day with a meal he has prepared to share.

Photos courtesy of Brother Faithful and Pastor Li

One patient he met this way was Xie Zishan, an executive at a large business group in one of China’s three northeastern provinces. Hospitalized with leukemia and suffering from high fever, Xie maintained a violent temperament. Over and over, he forced doctors, nurses, and Zhao out of the ward.

One day, Xie had a high fever that wouldn’t go away. His joints hurt and he was bleeding in many places. His wife said to Zhao, “Pray for him, and if his fever goes down, our whole family will believe in your God.”

Zhao replied, “I prayed and asked God to change his life, and whether the fever goes down or not, God is true and righteous.”

Xie’s fever did go down, and he trusted Jesus then and there.

Zhao never tells patients they will be healed if they believe in the Lord, but he helps them through prayer to see that they are sinners needing the Savior’s forgiveness and cleansing. It helps that he, along with others in his church, cook and serve meals for the sick.

Through Golden Apple’s ministry, views on life and death are being reshaped. Confucius said, “If you don’t know life, how can you know death?” Yet facing death directly is not a strength of Chinese culture today, according to Li.

Traditionally, Confucianism and Taoism have seen death as a natural part of life, like the change of seasons alternating with the gathering and dissipation of qi (the rhythmic energy that constitutes all things). Morality and meditation pave the way to an afterlife.

But modern Chinese are greatly influenced by atheism and materialism. For most people, death is not a familiar, controlled, and necessary process of life, but a mysterious and terrifying black hole that destroys all meaning and hope.

“We used to think of the body as the whole of life,” says Li, “so when the body is coming to an end, we are scared. But if you know that the body is just a vehicle, you can understand that though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. When your inside is satisfied with love, you will find that love transcends time and space, and perfect love drives out fear.”

Li’s Golden Apple care team, working with Liu Jin and caregivers like Zhao, has developed a curriculum around life and death as part of its innovative approach to elder care that has helped thousands in their final days. The course, “Life Care for the Critically Ill,” has become popular in wider Chinese circles. The team is helping churches in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, and Shandong to establish their own hospital ministry teams.

As China has tightened religious restrictions, some large local churches have been returning to more “underground” methods, like meeting in small, in-home groups. As many house churches begin to look for new ways to reach out to their communities, China’s elderly and critically ill populations are the kind of groups that are easy to overlook but in urgent need of the gospel message.

Li and Zhao see the church as precisely the right group to help China’s aging population see that hope in this life is anchored in hope for the next.

“After understanding what life is, when going through their own difficulties, they will gradually realize that things are not so miserable after the fear is removed. It is then that they can make the right judgment and choice, face death with no fear, and live life with no regret,” Li said.

Illustration by Xinyue Chen

Part II

“Auntie” Niu, at over 70 years old, was reluctant to socialize when she moved in with her son in Beijing several years ago. Instead, she made a hobby of buying health care products, taking all kinds of fraudulent health care telemarketing calls. When her son told her to avoid such schemes, she grew angry and sullen.

Niu was widowed at an early age. She worked hard to bring up a son and a daughter, but her daughter committed suicide in her 20s. Her son, too, was depressed. Had he not met the Lord, Niu says, both her children might be dead. Niu was known as a strong person, but she grew to feel that fate had abandoned her.

Her son thought it might help Auntie Niu to participate in something he’d heard about called the Life Storybook program, where she could work with a dozen other seniors to do crafts and games and participate in sessions where she would craft stories from her own experiences. In these storytelling workshops she could sort out her life, from birth to old age, helping her understand the struggles and recapture the good memories.

The program is an innovation of the Golden Apple Life Care Team, a ministry that aims to reach older Chinese people with physical and spiritual care.

Niu gave the Life Storybook group a try. But she wanted to quit after only a few lessons. For her, family memories were full of pain and unpleasantness.

Her perspective gradually shifted, however, with the guidance of mentors and in the company of other group members. Niu recalled that as a rural midwife, she had saved the lives of many unborn babies and newborns in the countryside. Time after time, her perseverance had brought joy to mothers after the pain of difficult deliveries. Niu realized that others in her group—both the elderly and the younger participants who accompanied them—were attentive to her stories. Soon she grew confident enough to share more. Her memories of saving babies became a comfort in a life that seemed to have lost purpose.

At the end of 12 “storybook sessions,” Niu became more actively involved in the program. She volunteered to promote it. She participated a second time. She testified in the class that “looking back at my life again, I don’t think I have any regrets anymore.”

“There are many Christian teams that provide what the elderly need, but we want to help them enter the depths of their own souls and truly know life, through our companionship and guided by our professional skills,” said Liu Jin, a Christian psychologist and counselor in Beijing who helped to develop the curriculum.

“The renewal of life is the renewal in the soul, and we can renew it every day if we want to. The same is true of the elderly, and the power of their life renewal will amaze people,” Liu said.

Combating depression, which is pervasive in China’s senior community, is one of the program’s major goals. Depression in the elderly can lead to rapid physical decline, pseudo-dementia, and even self-harm and suicidal thoughts.

“The elderly, like other psychologically vulnerable groups, suffer from a deep sense of loneliness. But behind the loneliness are two deeper issues. One is the fear of death. The other is the loss of a sense of worth that comes from the loss of control,” Liu said. Physical incapacity exacerbates feelings of loss, which can lead to the collapse of values.

“Older people are more likely to avoid relationships than younger people and become trapped in self-imposed isolation,” the psychologist said.

More and more churches and Christian teams across China have become involved in senior care ministries in recent years, reaching out to help their communities at a time when the church finds itself under more state scrutiny. According to Golden Apple, the Life Storybook program has also found its way into non-Christian social care institutions, where seniors from different backgrounds of various religions participate in the courses.

The elderly in China, one Chinese pastor told CT, “have an important place in missions.”

Eva Chou is a journalist living in Shanghai.

This article appeared in the The Globe Issue 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "No Fear In Death".

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Church Life

Feast of Eden

Angela Lu Fulton

Closed to outsiders and plagued by addiction, a Vietnam village tuned its radios to a California preacher. It has bloomed into a showcase for Hmong culture and an unlikely tourist destination.

Photo by Tim Barker

On a chilly Saturday morning, Hmong women sit in the sun and chat while embroidering and selling their harvest of jicama. In the marketplace behind them, a woman uses chopsticks to flip balls of dough in sizzling oil. A man displays handmade knives atop a wooden box.

The Hmong village of Sin Suoi Ho, home to more than 100 families in the highlands of northern Vietnam, draws weekend shoppers from nearby Hmong and Dao villages, as well as tourists from the capital of Hanoi. Until just recently, getting here required an 8-hour, 250-mile trip past terraced rice paddies and up winding, teeth-chattering dirt roads that reach high into the mountains.

The shoppers browse stalls filled with colorful hats, bags, and clothing. They examine pillowcases covered with traditional Hmong embroidery. They snap selfies in Hmong dresses and giggle at elaborate silver headdresses. Beyond the market, visitors stroll along a lane lined with potted orchids for sale. They eye young men lashing peach tree branches to motorbikes (the budding limbs will go to another market to be sold as decorations for Tet, Vietnam’s lunar new year celebration).

The tourists come not only for the wares but also to partake in a story of transformation—a story of economic advancement and changed hearts.

Photo by Tim Barker

Pastor Chang A Hang drives his motorbike through the gate outside the Sin Suoi Ho church.

Fifty-nine-year-old Chang A Hang is a witness to the change. I find him sitting in a plastic chair outside his store next to the marketplace. Children gripping ice cream cones drop coins into Chang’s outstretched hand. The lines etched into his face and the weary look in his eyes betray the hard life he’s lived.

For much of Chang’s life, Sin Suoi Ho was the poorest village in Lai Châu province. He and his family often lacked rice to eat. Residents grew opium poppy, and Chang, along with most of the village, was addicted to opium. Chang was also one of the village’s 10 shamans, responsible for curing the sick through the spirit world, yet tormented by spirits himself.

In 1992, villagers began hearing the gospel through a Christian radio broadcast. Faith spread quickly, despite government persecution. Chang at first brushed the new religion aside. But everything changed in 1998, when he says that one night he saw a spirit float to the bed where his wife lay fast asleep. The next morning she was deathly ill. Powerless to help, Chang asked the village pastor to come and pray for his wife. She was healed immediately.

The encounter changed Chang completely; he is now a pastor too, working in a nearby village church. Thirty years later, the majority of Hmong families in Sin Suoi Ho are Christians, save for about 20 families.

For these converts, the gospel has manifested itself not only in personal transformations but in community-wide change. Village pastor Hang A Xa, who prayed for Chang’s wife, taught villagers to apply the Bible to every aspect of their lives. They detoxed from their addiction. They gave up opium cultivation and grew orchids instead. They cleaned up their village and built a road. Because the Bible declared that men and women were equal, parents stopped the practice of demanding prohibitive bride prices, and they allowed young women to complete more schooling.

Corn cobs are hung out to dry outside a Sin Suoi Ho home.

And against all odds, Sin Suoi Ho became a tourist destination.

Villagers tell their story in religious terms, not economic ones. Across Vietnam, Christian belief has faltered among Vietnam’s majority Kinh population, who possess more of the country’s freedoms and wealth. But in ethnic-minority communities like Sin Suoi Ho—only 11 miles from the Chinese border, in a sensitive region where the Vietnamese government prohibits outside visitors—Christianity has spread.

Vietnamese pastors say the country’s rapid economic growth and the trappings of wealth are obstacles to sharing the gospel in the cities. In hardscrabble places like Sin Suoi Ho, however, the good news can bring beauty, flourishing, and a taste of Eden.

Vang A Chu, the associate pastor in the village, noted that Adam and Eve’s sin forced them out of the Garden. Yet in Sin Suoi Ho, “Jesus has come to earth and now we have freedom.”

“Where we live is Eden,” he said. “And we have to take care of our village.”

The Hmong people originated in China and began spreading to the mountainous areas of Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand in the 18th and 19th centuries in search of agricultural opportunities and to escape persecution from the Qing dynasty.

During the Vietnam War, the United States recruited Hmongs in Laos to help fight against the Communists. Hmong soldiers, led by General Vang Pao, blocked Hanoi’s Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and rescued downed American pilots. After the US military withdrew, many Hmongs were targeted by the communist government in Laos, leading thousands of Hmongs to resettle in the United States and other Western countries. Many Hmong refugees converted to Christianity. Their history of resistance led the government in Vietnam to view them suspiciously. Decades of government attempts to resettle, develop, and assimilate the Hmong left them “marginalized by programs that purport to development,” wrote anthropologist Tam Ngo in The New Way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam.

Photo by Tim Barker

Children play on the second floor of a building site next to Xa Cha restaurant in Sin Soui Ho.

Foreigners and missionaries had largely fled Vietnam by 1975, but the Far East Broadcast Company (FEBC) continued broadcasting the gospel into the country in minority languages. Beginning in the 1980s, Hmongs in Vietnam started tuning into a broadcast from a Hmong pastor in California who went by the radio name John Lee. Families, then whole villages, came to Christ. The new Christians started sharing the gospel with other Hmong villages.

Initially, Lee didn’t realize the impact his program was having in Vietnam, according to Reg Reimer’s Vietnam’s Christians: A Century of Growth and Adversity. By the late ‘80s he was receiving thousands of letters from Hmongs in Vietnam who had accepted Christ and wanted to learn more about the faith. Today more than a third of the 1 million Hmong in Vietnam are Christians.

Some Hmong villages saw their standard of living improve as they abandoned religious practices that required expensive animal sacrifice and learned to read in order to study the Bible.

Nowhere is the transformation more apparent than in Sin Suoi Ho, now a burgeoning destination for tourists who want to experience “untouched” Hmong life. In the 1980s, the village was no more than a few wooden houses in the jungle. Neighboring communities called it “Opium Village,” yet growing opium was never profitable; it left villagers poor, sick, and addicted.

Former village chief Hang A Lung first came across Lee’s program, Source of Life, in 1992 on a radio gifted to him by local government officials. He kept listening, as it was the only program in his native Hmong language. Soon he was hooked. Speaking in a melodious lilt, Lee incorporated Hmong folktales into his teaching to help Hmongs understand the gospel.

Pastor Vang A Chu with his grandson Vang Thi An outside of his home in Sin Suoi Ho.

A Lung was struck by Lee’s declaration that Jesus is the only way to heaven. During the rice harvest that year, he and his family became the village’s first Christians. They burned their altars to the spirits and their traditional burial clothes. “We prayed to Jesus to come into our house,” remembers A Lung’s daughter, Thi Do, who was 13 at the time.

Christians from a neighboring Hmong village came to teach the family more about Christianity and joined them in sharing the gospel with other families. Some, unhappy with Hang’s eagerness, reported them to the authorities.

Fearful that conversion to a “Western” religion would lead Hmongs to resist government power, local officials arrested and beat the new Christians. They confiscated radios, Bibles, and cassette tapes. Thi Do’s husband was beaten so badly that he could only eat rice porridge for weeks. Police held her brother-in-law in a house and tied him to a table. He gnawed through the rope to escape.

At the time, Thi Do said, their faith was so strong that they didn’t think about turning back. Other families joined their number: Villagers came to Christ after miraculous healings or finding freedom from the constant fear of spirits. By 1995, about 20 more families had turned to Christian faith. They started to gather for weekly worship in homes or in the jungle to avoid detection.

Most were still addicted to opium. Some worshipers smoked before and after services. One day while studying Matthew 5:16 (“Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven”), the believers felt the Holy Spirit convicting them to quit. “We had to stop using opium so that we could shine for other people to know about God,” said A Lung’s son, A Xa.

Church leaders brought addicted believers up into the jungle-covered mountains to help them detox. They cooked them meals, massaged their aching bodies, and washed their soiled clothes. To help pass the time, they taught them about God and sang worship songs. When withdrawal kicked in, they stopped them from running back into the village.

Returning to the village at the end of a two-week detox session, most eventually relapsed. But the few who stayed clean led the next group into the jungle. Some returned seven times before they could completely kick the habit, A Xa said.

It took 10 years, but by 2005 every Christian in the village had stopped using opium.

Escaping opium’s grasp was the first step of Sin Suoi Ho’s transformation. Next came breaking the village from cycles of generational poverty.

After deciding to become a pastor at age 20, A Xa went to study the Bible with other Hmong Christians in Yunnan, China, and later in Hanoi, despite having only a primary school education. Each time he returned to the village, he’d teach about the Bible and how it applied to everyday life. He led a small group—the first one in 2005, after which members went on to lead their own. By 2010, 100 villagers were trained to lead house church–like groups.

God called Christians to be witnesses, A Xa taught. So villagers needed to clean their homes and their village. Both humans and livestock shared the village roads. Feces, food scraps, and trash littered the ground. Even inside their homes, chicken and pigs roamed free. A Xa taught them that cleaning their living spaces prevented disease and sicknesses from spreading and was a way to take care of the land God had given them.

“It will be like salt and light to other villages,” said his sister, Thi Do. “They will know about God, that God is good, and that Christians are good, not bad.”

Next, A Xa taught villagers about setting goals and planning ahead, rather than being content with subsistence farming. He taught basic business skills to help them make more money for their labor. He pushed against the Hmong tradition of early marriage, where girls wed as young as 13 and cut short their education. He encouraged parents to keep both their sons and daughters in school.

A Xa also advocated against the custom of marriage dowries. Traditionally, a Hmong man’s family would pay the wife’s family a large dowry, saddling the newlyweds with debt and effectively selling the bride to her husband’s family.

To combat this, A Xa had to lead by example. His own daughter became the village’s first bride to not seek a dowry when she was married. (All three of his daughters graduated from college, another pioneering act.)

Pastor Vang A Chu preaches during the Sunday church service.

None of these changes happened overnight. Some villagers protested against A Xa’s ideas. “It’s so difficult to change people’s minds,” he said. “If we didn’t have the Bible, we couldn’t change.”

Another first: Residents decided to grow orchids to beautify the village in 2011. They trekked out to the jungle to find them and planted the orchids outside their homes. Then visitors from around the border region began offering as much as $42 to buy the plants. (Orchids are a common decoration for Tet.)

Sensing opportunity, villagers grew the flowers in earnest, making three times as much from selling orchids as they did their traditional crops. Today in Sin Suoi Ho, the orchids grow in pots and cover off-season rice fields. Growers train them to bloom during the week of Tet, when they fetch the highest price.

By 2012, A Xa and the new village chief, Vang A Chinh, realized the village needed a working road. It would make it easier to transport their rice crops to markets where they could sell it for more money, and it would allow people to visit the remote community.

The two men approached local officials. Would the government provide cement if the village provided its own sand and gravel? The officials agreed, then taught villagers the basic steps for construction. And the people of Sin Suoi Ho came together to build three miles of road.

Next, they opened a Saturday market. To lure customers, villagers put on roadside performances showcasing Hmong singing and dancing, catching the attention of passing motorists. Tourism grew, and the government began holding up Sin Suoi Ho as a model for local development without any outside help.

The persecution of Christians in Sin Suoi Ho gradually eased too. A Xa’s church, which is now part of the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination, earned official government recognition in 2011.

When they talk about their success, A Xa and other villagers don’t withhold their strategy: “If it was only based on the work of humans, we can’t change,” Vang, the associate pastor said. “Now you can see the village looks beautiful. It’s because we use the Bible for living our life.”

In 2015 the government officially recognized Sin Suoi Ho as a tourist destination, an act that effectively removed government restrictions on outside visitors. That sealed the transformation: A village once persecuted and isolated could now host visitors from across Vietnam and from around the world.

Photo by Tim Barker

Early morning outside the Sin Suoi Ho market held on Saturday mornings.

Families opened up their homes to tourists. They set up beds in their living rooms and extra seats at their tables. Those who couldn’t house visitors could sell their orchids, their vegetables, livestock, and handiwork—all at higher prices. They could run herbal baths or rent out Hmong dresses.

By the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Sin Suoi Ho saw about 100,000 visitors a year.

“When I was a kid, I never dreamed Sin Suoi Ho would become a tourism destination,” said Vang A Chinh, the village chief, sitting in the courtyard of his homestay with a creek flowing through a jungle-like garden and outdoor café. “After we became Christians, we learned how to make a plan for our lives and work to follow that plan. God changed Sin Suoi Ho into this.”

The pandemic paused tourism for two years. Villagers focused on growing orchids, cardamom, and rice. They built new bungalows and guesthouses. And they waited for the tourists to return.

Today, the main road in Sin Suoi Ho is clean and paved, running up the mountain past the thatched-roof church framed by an imposing gate made of curved tree branches. A woman dressed in a patterned Hmong jacket and skirt—over sweatpants—talks on her smartphone while a buffalo and her calf feed on a nearby tuft of grass. Further up the mountain, a coffeeshop overlooks the village and beyond—to rice paddies and jagged layers of blue mountains.

The owner of Ka Sha Coffee is A Xa’s daughter, 28-year-old Hang Thi Su. Rather than wearing traditional Hmong clothing, she’s dressed in a fuzzy brown jacket and jeans as she snaps photos for her Facebook account to promote the village. Not only was she the first woman here to sidestep an early marriage and graduate from college, but she was also the first to marry someone who is not Hmong (her husband is Kinh, Vietnam’s largest ethnic group). She is Sin Suoi Ho’s only English speaker.

When Thi Su and her sisters went to college, villagers called them lazy and whispered that they’d lost their way. “But [my father] didn’t care because he knows us, he knows what we are studying and what we are doing,” Thi Su said. “Now parents say, ‘Go to school and be like them.’”

Since returning in 2018, Thi Su has taken to heart her father’s exhortations that tourism doesn’t just help the village financially but is also an opportunity to share the gospel. When tourists visit, she introduces them to time-honored Hmong traditions like handwoven hemp clothing, harvest season dances, or tuj lub, a game where competitors try to knock each other’s giant spinning tops off balance.

But she’ll also tell them about traditions they’ve left behind: flutes and drums used in religious rituals, shamans, and bride kidnappings. She repeats the story of how God brought their village from filth to beauty, from addiction to freedom, from barrenness to bounty.

“Everything we do is for God, not only to make money,” Thi Su said. “I hope we can keep the Hmong culture, we can share our culture with the world, and we can share the gospel through our culture.”

Angela Lu Fulton is CT’s Southeast Asia editor. She reported this story from Sin Suoi Ho, Vietnam.

- More from Angela Lu Fulton

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