Yunnan Baoshan Gospel Addiction Treatment Center will be forced to relocate and currently asking for prayers to help them find the right relocation place for the center, said the center's co-worker.
Initiated in Qinghua Church in October 2007, the center moved to Changlinggang, which is close to the Burmese border a year later. It has served more than 150 drug addicts since the opening of the new center. It became popular in Yunnan and they call it "Rebirth Paradise."
Around a kilometer away from the nearest village, Changgangling is a quiet place where drugsters are trained to receive gospel addiction treatment. Once, a pastor who visited the center said, "If God permits, I would like to stay here for one and half a year to come closer to God, have devotions and shape spiritual characters."
A co-worker of the center shares that at least 88 students, whose lives have been transformed in Rebirth Paradise, returned to society in the past decade. Some of them stay in the center to help the new arrivals and some choose to study theology. Meanwhile, Midway Home was established to provide a transitional period for partial trainees before entering the society. Zhao Lianbin, the home's director, is a model who has beaten drug addiction.
For the past few years, the local authority proposed to construct Baoshan into a processing and logistics base in order to develop the economy and society by leaps and bounds.The center and Midway Home are included in the area that will be developed to become a industrial and trade garden. But the center has been already forced to move and the home will be the next one they may relocate.
But where are the suitable places where they will be relocated?
The treatment center will be first housed temporarily in a pastor's home before finding its new home. However, the makeshift site which is located in a village will bring more difficulty to the center's operation and higher pressure to the staff. What's worse, it will be relocated after one or two years, within the planning scope.
(The author is a co-worker of Yunnan Baoshan Gospel Addiction Treatment Center.)
