Nigeria mission trip takes volunteer far outside her comfort zone

Posted: 11/09/07

Nigeria mission trip takes volunteer
far outside her comfort zone

By Craig Bird

Baptist Child & Family Services

KINGWOOD—Paige Maupin played the numbers—10 days, 6,500 miles one way, 800 patients, 24 professions of faith, two remote villages and one life changed forever—her own.

Maupin, a member of First Baptist Church of Kingwood, near Houston, joined a recent Children’s Emergency Relief International medical missions team to Nigeria. The trans-Atlantic journey challenged her, since she can “count on the fingers of one hand” the number of times she has flown on an airplane and had “never imagined going to another country to serve God,” even for a few days, she said.

“I would be the last person to volunteer for a trip anywhere away from my family,” she explained.

“I’ve lived in the same Houston community since I was 4-years-old, and now our house is just a few blocks from my parents. I always shop at the same grocery store, usually vacation at the same spot and have attended the same church—Kingwood First Baptist—since I became a Christian. I really like my comfort zone.”

But a year ago her pastor, Kevin McCallon, began challenging the congregation to “believe that God is who he says he is and that, like Abraham, we could believe that, as well.”

For several months, Maupin recalled spending most Sundays sobbing through the sermons, yearning to do just that.

That’s why she found herself in Otululu and Anyigba, Nigeria, with a Children’s Emergency Relief International team. CERI is the overseas arm of Baptist Child & Family Services, a San Antonio-based agency affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

Her team treated 200 patients in Otululu and 600 in Anyigba.

“I’ve often heard people say that mission trips are sometimes about the volunteers and not always only about those they go to serve,” Maupin says. “I definitely found this to be true. I am forever grateful and changed because I believed God and saw his faithfulness—and so were my four precious girls, my husband and my family. I learned to reach out to others, see hope where things looked hopeless and pray.”

Every day, every face was etched into her memory. But the most vivid was the last day the team worked at Anyigba, at a clinic that had not been open in several years.

Andrew Bentley, a Tyler doctor who is the volunteer medical director for CERI, examines a young Nigerian at the Mission of Mercy orphanage in Otululu.

The people, desperate for treatment, pushed open doors, climbed through windows and even lied to get seen by the doctors and nurses and receive medicine and treatment.

“I found myself very disillusioned until I looked at it from God’s perspective,” she admits. “This was a picture of people in need, dying from disease or hunger. I was seeing what poverty looked like. It was not a pretty scene, and it drove people to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do, but that’s what desperation looks like.”

At church the next day, the team heard repeatedly that they had brought the people hope. “God used us to show them that they were not forgotten by him,” she says. “They needed, like us, to see that God loved them and heard their prayers.

“We received their thanks humbly, knowing it was us who should be thanking them. God’s gifts are good. He revealed himself to me in a greater way in Nigeria than I could see here in Kingwood.”

Alongside the medical clinics, team members witnessed and preached. At least 24 Nigerians made professions of faith in Christ, and numerous others rededicated their lives in response to their efforts.

“We are already planning on when we can go back and brainstorming ways we can help,” said CERI Project Director Pam Dickson, who led the team.

One volunteer already has placed her name on the list for the next trip—Paige Maupin.

For information about CERI’s work in Nigeria—as well as Moldova, Sri Lanka and Mexico—e-mail pdickson@cerikids.org, call (281) 360-3702 or visit www.CERIkids.org.