Trip To Ghana Opens Eyes and Hearts Of Mission Group

Fourteen-year-old Joshua Holt came back from a two-week mission trip to Ghana realizing how much he had.

"I saw how blessed I was, living in America and not Africa, because we have so much more than they do," said Holt, a freshman at Heritage High School.

But his mother, Aundria Holt, quietly reminded him that life is more complex than that: "So much more economically, anyway," she said, eyes cutting softly toward her son.

"We may have more things, but they have more than us in other ways," she said. "I watched them at worship, and they were so vibrant and alive. We have people who come to church here and sleep, taking so much for granted. They might be poor in things (in Ghana), but they have some things we could sure use."

Such are the lessons, still being learned, from a trip to Ghana organized by Vancouver resident Delores Dillard.

Fifteen members of North Portland's Fellowship Church of God recently returned from the trip. Among the travelers were Dillard and the five-member Holt family, all from Vancouver. Steven Holt Sr. is the minister at Fellowship Church. Dillard, also an ordained minister, operates All the World Ministries, which has led short-term missions to half a dozen countries, including Haiti, New Guinea, Mexico and Ghana, since she founded the nonprofit organization in 1995.

Ghana, on Africa's west coast, has a population of more than 19 million in a country slightly smaller than the state of Oregon. Ghana became Africa's first independent nation more than 40 years ago. While it has twice the per-capita output of most other countries in West Africa, Ghana still is affected by extreme poverty.

"There were open sewers, no paved streets, and it seemed like as long as a car runs, no matter how bad it looks, you just drive it," said Steven Holt Jr., 15, a junior at Heritage High.

But those are merely immediate impressions.

"A lot of the changes, a lot of the things our young people will realize from this trip, that won't happen until later, when they look back and realize how this changed their life," said Dillard, a school teacher who has made five trips to Ghana. "That's why I like to take young people on these trips, because they're not so set in their ways as older people."

Already, though, the trip also has taught the young people to question things a bit more deeply, to know that history is more complex than the paragraphs found in high-school texts.

"I never heard about some of this stuff before," said Holt Jr. "It was an eye-opening experience; things you never really hear about in school."

"Culture shock, dashed presuppositions, a little bit of fear being so far from home -- that's what I saw happen with the young people going to Ghana," Holt Sr. said.

While in Ghana, the mission group toured Cape Coast Castle, one hub of the slave trade on the African coast. The doorway leading into the fortress is emblazoned with various symbols sometimes associated with Christianity, including a lion, a sword and a crown. Over the exit door, then, are the words, "Say goodbye to yourself."

Thousands of captured slaves died before even making it through that door, and thousands more died on ships bound for South America, the Caribbean and the United States.

"It made me angry, hearing about how cruel they could be to the slaves and they still thought of themselves as Christians," said Anisa Holt, 12, a seventh-grader at Frontier Middle School.

While in Ghana, almost every young person gave away personal items, including their watches. "We'd give them things, and their faces would just light up," Steven Holt Jr. said.

In return, the group savors the gift of insight received from the trip. As Holt Sr. said, "I'm absolutely convinced that what happened to us on this trip, what we learned, especially the young people, we won't begin to understand that until many years from now."