This past summer I spent two months in which the only constant from day to day for me was the pair of 8-inch work boots that I had on my feet. I spent my summer with the Teen Missions International Madagascar team. I felt the Lord tugging on my heart to go on a mission trip for a while and in November of 2007, I started to seriously consider and look into it.
The country and people of Madagascar have a special place in my heart. My grandparents, Rev. Amos and Ovidie Dyrud, were missionaries there for about twenty years. I have heard countless stories of my dad, two aunts, and uncle growing up at the boarding school for the missionary kids, and of my grandparents out in the field. My dad worked in a hospital in Madagascar for two years right after my parents were married, so my oldest sister was born there. He took my family back for three months as he worked in a hospital again right after I was born. We have pictures, trinkets, games, decorative papers and tapestries from Madagascar all throughout our house, so even since childhood, Madagascar has always subconsciously been on my mind. Then in August of 2003, my family went back to Madagascar for three weeks. We took a road trip from the capital city, Antananarivo, south to Fort Dauphin, where my dad grew up at the boarding school, and then flew back to the capital. It was then, seeing all the places where my grandparents lived and worked, visiting the hospitals in which my dad worked and my sister was born, meeting the people who my dad grew up with and worked with years later, and just seeing the countryside and its people, that I fell in love with Madagascar.
Naturally, then, when I first thought about going on a mission trip, I wanted to go to Madagascar. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to arrange a trip there by myself with only one remaining American contact there, so I looked into Teen Missions International, an organization that my oldest sister went on a trip to Egypt with nine years ago. When I saw that they had a team going to Madagascar, I knew that it was the one I was supposed to be on! I sent out support letters at the end of January, and the Lord provided the over $5,000 I
needed to raise well before my deadline.
I left on June 20th and spent the first two weeks away from home at “The Lord’s Boot Camp” in Merritt Island, Florida. We lived in tents, got up at 5:30 to run the obstacle course each day, and took both classroom and hands-on classes to prepare us for the field. We learned things like block laying, steal tying, cement mixing, carpentry, and puppets, among many other things. All the teams took the same classes, whether you were a work or evangelism team. The goal of the classes was to make sure we would be useful on the field, and the goal of the uncomfortable living conditions of boot camp, the work boots we had to wear, the bucket bathing and laundry, the tents, the bucket flushing toilets and no running water, was to prepare us for the worst of mission fields. To be completely honest, I hated boot camp at first, but I knew I had to get through it in order to make it to Madagascar! It was through this time at boot camp that God helped me realize that I could not do it in my own strength; that I needed to surrender everything to Him.
When we first arrived in Madagascar, we had a few very long bus and truck rides. As uncomfortable as they were, they allowed for a lot of time to think and reflect. Missions has become heavy on my heart and Madagascar has always been very close to my heart, so I was hoping that this summer God would use this trip to reveal to me whether I am supposed to be a missionary to Madagascar or not. I found myself picturing myself living in Madagascar with a family some day and falling in love with the countryside, but I never did get a clear answer.
My team’s main work project was adding ceilings in the unfinished dorm rooms of the Bible Missions and Work Training Center that we stayed at in Mahajanga. We had four rooms to finish and we worked in pairs. The rest of the team worked on other various projects including building a railing (and chiseling rocks into blocks to be used as the foundation of it), building a staircase, and painting “English curriculum” animals, shapes, letters, and numbers on the outside walls of the school. We also taught the classes that we had taken to teams of Malagasy teens as we ran a boot camp.
I was not assigned a teaching job, so I actually had very little interaction with the Malagasy kids. As I struggled with having a good attitude about this, it made me wonder if maybe it was God telling me that I’d be back someday and that I needed to let my teammates have their turn. But then maybe it was God’s way of telling me that the Malagasy kids don’t need me and that it’s not His will for me to go back to Madagascar as a missionary. God has not revealed His specific plan for my future to me yet, and I am learning to be content with where He has me now.
by Hannah Dyrud
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