The diary entries

Josh Dye
Public relations intern
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia

One Mission team member Mark Singh with children from Boa Esperanca in Brazil.

It could be a One Mission motto: “Mission trips and service projects give young adults a greater vision of world needs—they discover they can make a difference.” This is Dr Wayne French. He is chaplain on Avondale College of Higher Education’s Lake Macquarie campus and staff advisor for the student mission club. “[Young adults] return home with a heightened sense of their personal abilities and are inspired to make a difference in their local communities. It often changes the direction of their lives forever.”

Here is an example. Four Avondale students travel up the Amazon River in northern Brazil over the yearend. Their mission? To work with the Adventist Development and Relief Agency to build toilets in several remote villages. Excerpts from their diaries follow.

First impressions

It’s early in the morning; the humidity is stifling; the rain pours down. The clay banks of the Amazon are incredibly slippery. We’re in a land of beautiful and unknown wildlife—alligators, anacondas, jaguars, macaws and piranhas. We’re given life jackets as we huddle together under a small tin roof on the boat we’ll call home for the next 14 hours.

The buzz in the air is a mixture of nervous energy, excitement and fear. The journey is rough. Patchy sleep is periodically interrupted as we abruptly brake to avoid a log—or is it an alligator? We forget our concerns as the rain stops and the sun rises. The warm yellow yoke of light reflecting off the boat’s wake comforts us. Surrounded by dense, lush rainforest, we continue into the unknown.—Anastasia Benton

Christmas favelas

We spend Christmas Day in the infamous shanty towns—or favelas—of Rio de Janeiro. It’s an eerie experience. The favelas expand outwards and upwards from the city centre, as if crawling up the surrounding mountains. It’s a beautiful sight, yet harsh and threatening—the favelas are home to criminals, drug lords, gang members.

The One Mission Brazil team

Our guide is the minister of a new Seventh-day Adventist church, a humble building—not much more than a shed and a couple of rooms—that now, in the midst of the violence and theft, hosts Bible studies, free educational classes for children and worship services. The Lord is working on the people in this place of unrest.—Blair Lemke

God’s hand at work

I can clearly see God’s leading on our trip. We get lost within the first hour of our journey up the Amazon; we all avoid sickness; we overcome the language barrier; and our food supplies, despite running low, never run out.

God uses us to minister to the villagers. It feels like we are literally His hands and feet—playing with the children, building toilets for the villagers and sharing our faith through the translators. We feel part of the same family despite being so far from home.—Olivia Jones

God’s love

At night when we have worship, the chief asks if his family can come and listen. The theme of one of these worships is love. We read from 1 Corinthians 13, including my favourite verse—13: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (NIV). We take something as simple as love for granted, but it seems some of the villagers find it harder to comprehend. The worship leader, Dada, asks the husbands and wives to hug and to tell each other, “I love you.” Dada tells us later this will be the first time some of them have said this to their spouse—many don’t marry for love. Compared with other statements in the Bible, this one—to love—seems so simple, but to love sincerely is difficult.—Megan Townend

The One Mission contribution to campus life

Josh Dye
Public relations intern
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia

One Mission Brazil team member Sharon Trindall and co-leader Joel Slade with children from Boa Esperanca in Brazil. The team’s legacy may not be the toilets it built to improve hygiene in the village. One Mission creates a sense of community on campus, particularly by bringing students from different faculties together, says Joel. He is studying ministry and theology; Sharon nursing. “It unites people with similar passions to do amazing things for God.”

“It’s early in the morning; the humidity is stifling; the rain pours down.” Anastasia Benton and 15 other students from Avondale College of Higher Education are huddling together under a small tin roof on the boat they will call home for the next two days. They’re travelling up the Amazon River to some of the most remote villages in northern Brazil. Surrounded by lush green rainforest and exotic wildlife—alligators, anacondas, jaguars, macaws and piranhas—they zip up their life jackets as they embark on the journey.

The team worked with the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) to build toilets, which will improve hygiene and help the villagers “overcome sanitary problems affecting their community,” says Megan Townend.

Team members looked to Megan, one of the leaders of the trip, as their problem solver, particularly when their supply of food dwindled. “We’d sent for food, but the boat was two days late in returning and we were struggling to feed everyone. We had enough food for only one or two more meals. So, we were pretty excited when we finally heard the boat approaching.”

Megan joined 43 of her classmates as volunteers in Brazil, the Philippines and the Solomon Islands over the summer. The trips were organised by Avondale student club One Mission.

For the third consecutive year, a team visited the village of Maitom on the island of Negros Oriental in the Philippines. One Mission Philippines members have raised $70,000 over the three years, which they have used previously to build a classroom and now the first stage of an auditorium for the local Seventh-day Adventist school. Co-leader Tyson Dunne says the auditorium will be a valuable addition. “Besides enabling the school to host its own events, the auditorium will provide a source of income as the school hires it out to the local community.” The team has also used the money to run kids’ clubs and evangelistic programs, through which 60 people have been baptised.

The Solomon Islands team, also in its third consecutive year, ran kids’ clubs, conducted soccer clinics, taught English classes, led Bible studies and presented a series of worship meetings in the villages it visited. Team member Jamie Stanley says the generosity of the villagers moved him. “Their warmth and openness caught me off guard. Despite having less than us, they seemed to serve us more than we served them, and this made me reflect on my own priorities.”

Jamie’s experience is common and creates a sense of community on campus, says One Mission co-leader Joel Slade. “It unites people with similar passions to do amazing things for God.” It is also central to the Avondale experience. “Mission trips and service projects give young adults a greater vision of world needs—they discover they can make a difference,” says Lake Macquarie campus chaplain and One Mission staff advisor Dr Wayne French. “They return home with a heightened sense of their personal abilities and are inspired to make a difference in their local communities. It often changes the direction of their lives forever.”

The service culture on campus will grow this year. Joel’s goal is for more local community-based One Mission trips. “While serving overseas is important, we can’t forget our own backyard. I want everyone to experience the joy of service, and I want that joy to spread across campus.” Jessica Ennor is the face of a new partnership between ADRA Australia and Avondale. Employed by ADRA with support from Avondale, Jessica will support One Mission by coordinating possible overseas service projects for students and providing training for mission trip leaders. “One Mission has the leaders and the students,” says Jessica, “ADRA has the projects. My role is to provide links between the two.”

The potential is exciting, says Wayne. “Avondale’s administrators, staff members and student leaders recognise the importance of service and value the positive impact it makes on our student body.”