The Online Reflector

Twelve students and three faculty members gave a presentation that included pictures and stories about how they were changed during a Spring Term trip to Sierra Leone on Sept. 21.

The trip lasted for 15 days in May when students were able to go overseas to work and become more culturally aware.

Adviser for the trip Chaplain and Assistant Professor and Ecumenical and Interfaith Programs Lang Brownlee said that it was a pilgrimage of service.

“God would be working in the lives of the people there,” Brownlee said. “We would see people doing God’s work and be able to help do God’s work as well.”

Junior social work major Carla Richey and junior math and actuarial science major Austin Cripps said that the trip was not only a service learning project but also a spiritual experience.

Cripps said that he was very enthusiastic about taking a trip that allowed him to see how Christians around the world lived.

Because the trip was a service-learning project, the team worked on a dormitory, to make it livable. Richey said that she got the opportunity to paint and sand rooms.

“We actually had to shoo out livestock,” Cripps said. “It was quite the experience.”

The children of the community even helped the team carry water from a pump and mix the cement.

To prepare for the two-week trip, the students had to go to a series of five to six meetings taught by Brownlee, Assistant Director of International Division Geri Watson and Chaplain and Director of the Lantz Center for Christian Vocations and Formation Jeremiah Gibbs. All of them helped instruct the students about what they would face in Africa.

Richey said she only attended the last meeting because of her roommate’s persistence, but she still felt called to go afterward. Cripps, however, had been thinking about going for quite some time. Both students said that the meetings helped them feel prepared.

The group left Indianapolis with a maximum of 50 pounds of luggage each. When they arrived in Sierra Leone, tour guides from Operation Classroom were awaiting them.

UIndy partnered with Operation Classroom, which is a worldwide organization that has a satellite agency in Sierra Leone.

Brownlee said that UIndy teamed up with Operation Classroom because of their Methodist roots, which made the choice an easy one.

The guides from Project Classroom showed them the cities of Bo and Tiama, as well as where they would stay in the Presidential Suite at Njala University, where the president of Sierra Leone stays when he visits the area.

Cripps said that the community was joyous and hospitable.

“They were used to [Caucasians] coming to help them, but me, being black, was strange for them, foreign,” Richey said.

According to Richey, the locals took a little while to open up, but once they did, she had to fight off suitors.

Cripps remembered learning songs in Mende, the main tribal language, and said the local people would sing for hours over cooking meals, walking through town, or around the campfire.

“One of the main songs they would sing was “Telam Tenke”. It means, ‘Tell God thank you,’” Brownlee said.

According to Cripps, the locals were not the only ones to share their songs.

“One night, we even taught them some of our songs,” Cripps said. “It took them a little while, but they seemed to enjoy it.”

Cripps and Richey both met students from Sierra Leone with whom they still correspond. The trip touched the lives of the students,  making many want to return.

“In the US, we take so much for granted when some of them [in Sierra Leone] don’t even have their families,” Richey said. “I want to change that.”