Imagine stepping
out of a jeep and right into the middle of the African bush, feeling
alienated from everything familiar, with nothing to comfort you
but people you have never met and the African wild.
Appalachian senior and geography major Corinne E. Harvey faced
this situation when she traveled to Africa for approximately four
weeks this past summer.
Harvey spent almost the entire month of August in Africa with
the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Organization,
gathering Global Positioning System (GPS) data.
Harvey stayed with missionaries for her first week in Zambia,
a nation located in the center of southern Africa. She spent the
duration of her trip with a team of five workers.
“Our assignment was to go out into the bush each day and
find churches. We would write down their exact global position
so the missionaries could see what areas had been reached,”
Harvey said.
GPS allows the user to precisely locate their position anywhere
on the globe. The data Harvey’s team collected will be a
major mapmaking tool.
Harvey said she based her decision to go to Africa mostly on her
faith.
“God dropped this opportunity into my life, and I took it,”
she said. “Plus, it’s Africa. I’ve never been there,
and I couldn’t think of a better way to spend my summer.”
Harvey’s parents were also supportive of this venture.
“Initially, we were a little concerned for Corinne’s
safety, but we have lived overseas as a family before, and that
helped alleviate some of the anxiety. We are very proud of her
for undertaking such a challenge and sacrificing both time and
potential earnings,” they said.
April R. Klaasen said she was very proud of her friend Harvey.
“I admire Corinne because she doesn’t let circumstances
hinder her from seizing an opportunity,” Klaasen said. “She
was actually excited about living in a mud hut with no shower.
She has a real sense of adventure and love for the Lord.”
Harvey’s day in the bush began at dawn. The villagers woke
before sunrise to boil bath water and make breakfast.
Their food consisted of “nshima,” which is cornmeal
and water cooked and rolled into a ball. Nshima is served with
“relish,” which implies anything from spinach leaves
with onion to bananas. After breakfast, Harvey would have her
shower.
“We never really took a shower. You stood in a small mud
hut with a circular opening at the top and a floor of rocks,”
Harvey said. “As someone pours the bath water into the hole,
you try to wash off as much dirt as you can. Mostly my face and
feet, there wasn’t enough water to wash my hair.”
Once the entire team had showered and eaten, they would have a
short prayer time and then break up into groups. They had three
bikes between the six of them so each day half would walk and
half would ride bikes. The next day they would alternate. The
team left the village at noon, and returned around 4 or 5 p.m.
“We just started walking, and we would talk to people as
we met them. No one spoke English so we had to rely solely on
translators,” Harvey said. “We ran into a lot of evidence
of witchcraft. We even talked to a former witchdoctor.”
The team returned to the village after a long day of walking or
biking and ate supper. Supper was much the same as breakfast.
“Meat was very rare. However, we did eat goat esophagus and
goat intestines. Both are very chewy. Two guys actually ate goat
brain, but I just couldn’t do that,” Harvey said.
After dinner, they held services, mostly of worship. By midnight,
the team was off to bed. They slept in the church with about 25
of the village people who would not walk home because it was too
dangerous.
Harvey also spent a week in Zimbabwe helping take care of the
missionaries’ children. They returned to Zambia for the remainder
of the trip, where they stayed in the capital, Lusaka. Life in
the city was not as extreme as life in the wilderness, but Harvey
said she felt the people in the bush were better off.
“They are able to live off the land and provide for themselves,
whereas the city people must rely on the economy of the nation,”
she said.
The team spent the last two weeks helping arrange all the data
and discovering that the missionaries would need newer computers
and software before they could actually map the church positions
out.
“Although we didn’t actually get to input the data,
collecting all of it is already a tremendous start,” Harvey
said.
“Everyone should have an experience like this. It really
shows how blessed Americans are. I encourage others to pray for
the missionaries over there. They are not just a bunch of people
trying to spread the gospel — they are meeting human needs.”
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