This scholarship was established in memory of Peter and Valborg Torjesen. Peter and Valborg Torjesen were born in 1892 in Kristiansand, Norway. Peter's family had for generations been the master chimney sweeps of Kristiansand. Valborg's father was the captain of a commercial three master that sank in a North Sea storm before any SOS was possible. Valborg was the oldest of three young children.
At age 17 Peter attended a talk by a missionary back from China. Right there he got "the call" to help bring the gospel to China. When the collection plate came by, be added a slip of paper with three words, “og mit liv"-"and my life". His Sunday school teacher, who counted the collection, recognized the handwriting and quietly kept the note.
To prepare for his China calling, Peter sailed to America in 1911. He studied first at the newly formed Free Church Bible School in Rushford Minnesota (which over the next century expanded to Minneapolis, to Chicago, and now is Trinity University in Deerfield, IL).
In 1914 Peter enrolled in the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. When he was $38 short in bis tuition payments, he took a semester off to work on a Wisconsin farm. He graduated in 1917. Peter applied to become an American, but the judge gave him a choice: be an American or go to China. So, Peter returned to Norway, fulfilled bis World War One military draft, and courted his childhood friend, Valborg.
As the oldest of Kaptein Tonnessen's three children, Valborg had helped her mother to endure that endless year or more of waiting for any news of the shipwreck, and to care for her younger siblings/ And now Valborg shared Peter’s China dream. She gave up a promising business career in Kristiansand for training as a nurse, first in Norway, and then w England.
Peter sailed for China in 1918, Valborg in 1921. They fulfilled their required three years of Chinese language study before they could be married.
And then their assignment was to introduce Jesus to the people of Hequ, a remote city at the Intersection of the Great Wall and the Yellow River. To reach Hequ back then, you took the train to end of the line, and then five days by mule over the mountains. Over time, a small but vibrant Chinese Christian community was growing in Hequ and beyond.
(And four babies had arrived. They grew up bilingual in Norwegian and Chinese, and learned English when they arrived at the British school for missionary children at Chefoo on the coast.)
China in the l930's was roiled in a three-way war between Japanese invaders, the Chinese Government, and the Communist insurgents. Hequ often changed hands, amid much violence. The mission station was often crowded with refugees and the wounded.
On December 14, 1939, Japanese planes destroyed the mission station in a targeted air raid. Peter Torjesen's body lay buried in the debris. His teenage pledge had been paid in full. Valborg survived the blast. As she surveyed their broken home, she notal the daily calendar was still hanging on a standing piece of wall That morning she and Peter bad read the days verse together:
"As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:9)
Valborg stayed on for several months in Hequ to help with plans for reconstruction. But she was determined to get back to her children on the coast. This took many weeks, part of it by foot through edges of the Ordos desert to avoid enemy lines.
The journey finally yielded a wonderful reunion with her four children in Chefoo. Valborg was then asked to fill a vacancy as director of the Chcfoo home for visiting and retired missionaries. And when Edvard, her firstborn, graduated from Chefoo, she arranged to him to sail to the US and live with a distant uncle.
Then came Pearl Harbor. All Western countries declared war on Japan, and the Japanese regarded all Westerners as the enemy. All their possessions -were now the property of the Emperor, including the campus of the Chefoo School, which the Japanese urgently wanted.
In August 1942 the several hundred Chefoo students and their teachers walked several miles across town to Temple Hill, where a former compound had been converted to an internment camp. Most of the grownups went by truck or rickshaws. The children marched in three columns, the older boys, the older girls, and the younger kids, accompanied by teachers. To the amazement of onlookers, they sang hymns most of the way. One of the teachers, Stanley Haughton, had written and taught them a hymn for the occasion, based OD Psalm 46.
God is our refuge, our refuge and our strength.
In trouble, in trouble, a very present help,
Therefore, will not we fear. Therefore, will not we fear.
The Lord of Hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge.
Temple Hill had four fairly large homes which now had about 70 persons in each of them. Three of them were for the Boys School, the Girls School and the Prep School for the youngest children. The fourth, led by Valborg. was for older missionaries, with a few dozen helper boys in the attic. All children bad jobs to do, and school continued.
Eleven months later the same group made a grim journey by cargo ship and train to the much larger internment camp at Weihsien. It held about 1,500 westerners from Northern China. This included Eric Liddell, the Olympic hem and China missionary, whose story became the movie, "Chariots of Fire.” He became everybody’s surrogate father and friend. Again, the teachers continued the Chefoo school and made life as normal as pos51"ble for the children.
As the years progressed, food got shorter and morale was harder to sustain. Children shared school books and clothing with younger children and walked barefoot in the summer to save shoes for winter.
The internments had lasted for three years, and the prisoners were vaguely aware that the war was nearing an end. One morning a plane flew over that sounded different from the Japanese planes. It returned, waving its wings and was obviously an American plane. The prisoners ran around wildly, shouting for joy! Then they saw an incredible sight. Seven paratroopers were floating down outside the prison walls. They all bad the same instinct. They ran for the main gate, where the Japanese guards backed off. Not a shot was fired! The seven paratroopers were lifted above the prisoner's heads and carried into the camp. There the Japanese commander banded his ceremonial sword to the American commander. The paratroopers bad liberated the camp. One of them was a graduate of the Chefoo school who had requested the assignment.
It took many months to devise plans for evacuations to many countries. The Torjesen family finally sailed on a Liberty ship to Canada, and then on to the US. Two children, Kari and Hakon, stayed in America. Valborg and her youngest son, Torje, returned to Norway. In 1949 they returned to unite the family in the US. All the children eventually became US citizens. Valborg began a small Bible class with Chinese students living in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. This over time grew into the largest Chinese American church in Minnesota. In 1952, at age sixty, Valborg went to Taiwan to work with Chinese refugees from mainland China. During her three years in Pingtung she helped to establish three churches among Mandarin speaking people from China.
In 1955 Valborg returned to Minneapolis and continued her work with the Chinese students. In 1964 she went out one cold winter morning and slipped and broke her hip. After 45 years in ministry to the Chinese people she returned to Norway in 1966 to retire. She moved to Heaven on December 12, 1970.
In 1988 family members were able to return to Hequ. There they learned that Peter and Valborg Torjesen were still warmly remembered. City officials of Hequ offered to build a monument in their honor. They allowed the Torjesen family to write the inscription in Chinese. Many family members attended the dedication in I 990. Subsequently they established the Shanxi Evergreen Service in memory of Peter and Valborg. Hundreds of Christians from China and the Western World have worked in the Evergreen Project in Shanxi, including in Hequ. This project continues to the present.
The Hequ monument includes the Chinese version of this inscription from Jeremiah 17:7-8.
Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord.
He is like a tree planted by the water,
that sends out its roots by the stream,
and does not fear when the heat comes,
for its leaves remain green,
and is not anxious in the year of drought,
for it does not cease to bear fruit.
In memory of Peter and Valborg’s commitment to seeing the advancement for the gospel in China, recipients of this scholarship must be international students from China who are intending to serve in ministry in China.
