ATLANTA – Thirteen students, six countries, eight goals and one underlying motivation – to see the gospel in action.

This summer 13 undergraduate and graduate students embarked on a 50-day worldwide journey to experience how the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s efforts intersect with the United Nations’ eight Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) for reducing global poverty. Part of the Fellowship’s Student.Go missions program for students, this one-of-a-kind trip offered students a firsthand look at poverty’s impact as well as the opportunity to explore what Christians are, can and should be doing to help the world’s impoverished.   

“The gospel is why we took this journey,” said CBF’s training manager John Derrick, who helped develop the experience after a CBF student conference in January 2007. 

In a workshop about the MDGs, then Auburn University student Rosie Stafford asked Derrick how students could respond.  Seven months later, Derrick called Stafford with an answer – a MDG-related trip she couldn’t resist.

“There was little choice involved in deciding to go,” Stafford recalled. “How could I have said no?”

Twelve other students felt the same way, and in late June this Student.Go team began their two-month journey in Washington, D.C., where they met with the ONE Campaign and CBF partners Bread for the World and Baptist World Aid. From there they went to Romania, where they learned from CBF field personnel Susan and Wes Craig about Ruth School, which provides education to Roma Gypsy children who are often the subject of discrimination.

“[It was] meaningful for me watching the students interact with the Roma children, loving them unconditionally,” said CBF missions advocate Jennifer Fuller, who traveled with the team in Romania.

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. The students saw the magnitude of the AIDS crisis in a children’s home housing more than 400 AIDS orphans. They heard stories of people desperate for food. And – side by side with Ethiopians – the students helped drill a well that will provide 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 CBF partner McAfee School of Theology in Atlanta, Ga. “The completed project was going to mean life for the people [in that village].”

Next the students traveled to the nearby country of Uganda, where they met local CBF field personnel Jade and Shelah Acker and again saw other MDG-related projects in action. They visited schools, churches, slums and an isolated refugee camp, where 2,000 people had been displaced by civil war and were living without a clean water source and no assistance from outside aid organizations.

“I witnessed an injustice, a forgotten people,” said Stafford. “It haunts me still.”
 
From Uganda, the team spent several days in New York City, where they visited the United Nations’ Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and attended a presentation at the United Nations before traveling to experience one of the poorest areas of Nicaragua. Through a partnership with Witness for Peace, the students stayed in homes with local residents, sleeping on the floor or in hammocks, bathing in the river and eating whatever their host family 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 CBF partner Christopher White Divinity School at Gardner-Webb University.

Attending the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City, Mexico, was the final leg of the two-month journey. As 13 of the 25,000 attendees, the students learned more about what they could do in response 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,” said Caitlin Sandley, an Auburn University student.
 
As a way to encourage a tangible response to the trip, the students are required to develop their own MDG-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.

But the project is only one tangible aspect of the transformation these students have experienced.

“We hear about global need and hunger everyday 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 in Cape Giradeau, Mo.

“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.” 

To read more about the trip, go the Fellowship blog at www.thefellowship.info/blog.

CBF is a fellowship of Baptist Christians and churches who share a passion for the Great Commission and a commitment to Baptist principles of faith and practice. The Fellowship’s mission is to serve Christians and churches as they discover and fulfill their God-given mission.