Students come together for international mission and service
Over Christmas break, more than 30 students took part in mission trips. These trips included traveling to Jamaica, Bonaire and the Bahamas.
The Jamaica trip, which visited the Mustard Seed Communities, included students from education, sociology, biology and nursing major backgrounds.
”I was a sociology major, but it was mostly nursing majors, which makes sense because the Mustard Seed Communities is a care facility,” said sophomore Kelsey Prough.
The Mustard Seed Communities take in kids with disabilities who have been abandoned or their families are unable to care for them.
”It’s not as terrible as it sounds,” said Prough. “The kids who have family alive often get visited by them.”
The Jamaica trip took place from Dec. 31 to Jan. 7. Students on the trip were responsible for helping feed and playing with the children of the community. There were also two labor projects on the trip in which the students had to weed and clear a path along the walls and paint the community’s chapel.
”We had nice weather too,” said Prough. “It rained during the night almost every night, but it was always sunny and warm come morning.”
One of the other service trips was to the Bahamas, which was a mission trip primarily for education majors, but it was still open to other majors, including criminal justice major Tori Bailey. On this mission trip, students volunteered at two different locations: the Nazarene Center and a church.
”We spent our mornings from 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. at the Nazarene Center, it’s an orphanage, and from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. we volunteered at the church,” said Bailey. “We spilt into groups for both of those places. I worked with kids from a wide range of ages.”
At the orphanage, groups of students worked with groups of about four kids ranging from age nine to 12. At the church they worked with much larger groups of kids, between 15 and 20, and taught them vacation bible school style activities.
”We would teach the kids about math, science, reading and art, all while incorporating games and activities based on their ages,” said Bailey.
The last service trip was to the Trans World Radio in Bonaire. he Department of Communication service trip. The Trans World Radio mission is to spread gospel music to the world, especially to the places with a lower number of Christians. One of the main target areas of the radio station was Cuba, where Christianity was not allowed, or was hardly practiced, but is now more accepted. Cuba now is about eight percent Christian.
”The station is also in the process of expanding its transmission signal from 250,000 watts to 450,000 watts. To put that into perspective, the largest transmission signal legal in the United States is 50,000 watts,” said Brennan McCall, junior electronic media major and general manager of WCTV. “Basically, the signals will bounce off the ocean, off the atmosphere, then the place the signal is intended to go.”
The students in Bonaire also did a lot of manual labor, including cutting grass, doing electrical work and repairing the barbed wire fences around the transmitter towers.
”I’ve been to a third world country before and this was really nice to what I’ve experienced before. There was air conditioning and couches to sleep on,” said McCall. “Other places I’ve been to [separate from the university],
we’ve slept on concrete floors and it made us feel like we were in it with them. But this was nice that we didn’t have to do that.”