No Man's Land was a very strange place.
It was surrounded by a beautiful scenery of mountains and located right on a big river. However, the city itself was incomplete to say the least. It was just the beginning of a city. From what we have gathered it was a small town before, but they decided to build a larger city there so they cleared out enough room for the city and started from scratch. They were literally building the entire city simultaneously. They started building a year ago and they had the basic framework for most of the buildings about done. Now don't get me wrong, this was not by any means a big city. It was approximately 2 complete blocks of city and the rest was an old agricultural village.
The only way to describe being there is to picture being on a television set where everything looked good on the outside and seemed like it was a city but nothing was actually working or functional on the inside.
The main roads in the city had not been paved because they were still working on the buildings and mixing concrete on the ground outside the buildings. There wasn't a sidewalk to walk on, we could only walk down the middle of the road dodging piles of dirt that would soon be used in a concrete mixture and cars that were flying through the city. The cars would fling up dust leaving a permanent cloud of dark dust in the air all throughout the town. At night the dust looked like a deep fog and looking down the road you could see people walking uneasily and dodging dirt piles…. it looked like zombies!
Many stores were getting finished during our month there and we witnessed many firework displays celebrating the opening of the new stores.
No Man's Land was a city filled up with what is called "the minority" people group. It is approximately 90% muslim and there were 3 temples in this small town. There was also a large number of Tibetans that would come to the city for the day to buy food, but did not live in the city. We tried to get a contact with the Tibetans but after asking endless times to go up to their Monastery in the mountains without speaking real words to them, they thought we wanted rides on their motorcycles, so some of our team got motorcycle rides from them.
The food variety in the city was… sparse. We had noodles noodles and more noodles. No matter what restaurant you bought the noodles at they all tasted the same. They would have some broth and soup and little pieces of meat in them, and they all tasted the same. We had noodles for lunch and dinner all month long. My favorite thing in No Man's Land was the Milk Tea. Milk Tea is a drink that you can find all over China and it is delicious! Some Milk Tea's come as a packaged drink but the kind that we had in No Man's Land was a powdered drink mix that you add hot water to. Yummmm.
We did a lot of exploring around the area. There were 4 or 5 small communities that we could easily get to. The whole area thrived on agriculture and it was surrounded by many farms.
Well, that about sums up the area that we were all month. We stayed in a small hotel in No Man's Land and scouted out potential future ministry options in the area. More on that to come.
