Day Ten: The Ladakhi People

Who are the Ladakhi?
It used to be that all Ladakhi lived in India, in the Aksai Chin area of the Himalayan Mountains. In 1949 however, China annexed over 14,000 square miles of the territory. The area was so remote that the Indian government didn't even realize the Chinese had built a road there until two years later. Now nearly 3,000 Ladakhi officially live in Tibet, China, although national boundaries mean very little to them. Their homeland of thousands of years is so cut off from the rest of the world that their lives are not affected by whether they officially live in China or India. 

Winter temperatures in the Himalayas can dip down as low as -22 degrees Fahrenheit, and so it is no surprise that the Ladakhis believe hell is a miserably cold place. Like their Tibetan neighbors, the Ladakhis practice Buddhism, mixed with dark images of the pre-Buddhist Bon religion. The Ladakhi cling to a hopeless belief in a never-ending cycle of life and death. Moravian missionaries began working among the Ladakhi in India in 1856 and had about 150 converts by 1922. The only Scriptures in the Ladakhi language are portions of the Gospels translated by the Moravians in 1904. Today there are about 120 Ladakhi Christians in three churches in India. There are no known Christians among the isolated Ladakhi of Tibet.

Points of Prayer:
1. That the few Ladakhi Christians would have a passion for reaching their entire people group with the gospel of Christ.

2. For the Lord to call many Christians to pray for and reach out to the needy Ladakhi people in Tibet.

3. That many Ladakhi would soon trust Jesus as their Savior and experience His life-changing power.