 Students on a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship-sponsored tour of projects associated with the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals work alongside local villagers to drill a well that will provide clean water for a village in Ethiopia. (Photo courtesy CBF) |
This summer, 13 undergraduate and graduate students took a 50-day journey to experience how Cooperative Baptist Fellowship efforts intersect with the United Nations’ eight Millennium Development Goals for reducing global poverty.
Those goals include an end to poverty and hunger, universal education, gender equality, child health, maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, environmental sustainability and global partnerships.
As part of CBF’s Student.Go missions program, the trip offered students a first-hand look at poverty’s impact and gave them an opportunity to explore what Christians can and should do to help the impoverished.
“The gospel is why we took this journey,” said CBF training manager John Derrick, who helped develop the experience after a CBF student conference in January 2007.
In a workshop about the millennium goals, then-Auburn University student Rosie Stafford asked Derrick how students could respond. Seven months later, Derrick called Stafford with an answer — a trip she couldn’t resist.
In late June, team members began their two-month journey in the nation’s capital, where they met with the ONE Campaign and CBF partners Bread for the World and Baptist World Aid.
They went to Romania, where they learned from CBF field personnel Susan and Wes Craig about Ruth School and the education it provides Roma Gypsy children.
The next stop was Ethiopia to visit CBF field personnel David and Merrie Harding and to witness the impact of AIDS, famine and lack of clean water, including a visit to a children’s home that cares for more than 400 AIDS orphans.
They heard stories of people desperate for food, and they assisted Ethiopians to drill a well for clean water.
“I have never been a part of such an awe-inspiring thing in my whole life,” said Carson Foushee, 23, a student at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology. “The completed project was going to mean life for the people” in that village.
Students then went to Uganda, where they met CBF field personnel Jade and Shelah Acker and saw goal-related projects. They visited schools, churches, slums and an isolated refugee camp, where 2,000 people displaced by civil war live without a clean water source and no assistance from aid organizations.
“I witnessed an injustice, a forgotten people,” Stafford said. “It haunts me still.”
From Uganda, the team spent several days in New York City at the United Nations before heading to one of the poorest areas in Nicaragua. Through a partnership with Witness for Peace, students stayed in local homes — sleeping on the floor or in hammocks, bathing in the river and eating what host families offered.
“We left full of awe and appreciation. This leg of our journey has been absolutely … full of renewed hope,” said Karen Taylor, a student at Gardner-Webb University’s Christopher White Divinity School.
The International AIDS Conference in Mexico City was the final leg for participants. There they learned how to respond to the global pandemic.
“God opened our minds and hearts to learn about the virus that is still growing, still killing, and still has no cure,” Auburn University student Caitlin Sandley said.
Now students are required to develop a goal-related project at their university, seminary, church or other venue. One student is coordinating a sports-development program to support primary education and pediatric health initiatives in Uganda and Nicaragua. Another student hopes to develop an awareness program among sororities at her school.
Students note other tangible aspects of the transformation they experienced.
“We hear about global need and hunger every day — but to see such a thing, to have those faces and names and stories to go along with it, is an invaluable tool of clarity and purpose,” said Caleb Tankersley, 20, a student at Southeast Missouri State University.
“There is no way I will ever be the same,” said Samford University student Mary Beth Gilbert, 20. “I began a journey that has no end in sight.”
And that’s just what John and Amy Derrick, who joined the students for portions of the trip, hoped this experience would do.
“To have this kind of experience at such an early age is an incredible gift,” said Amy Derrick, CBF’s student-missions specialist. “They have the rest of their lives to act upon it. My hope is that they do just that — act on this for the rest of their lives.”
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