2008 Woodie Awards
BCM head to Zimbabwe
Casey Northcutt
Issue date: 3/13/08 Section: College Life
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or 18 students, summer means unemployment and $25 million sodas because of economic recession.
July 9 through 21, 20 students from Murray State's Baptist Campus Ministries will join 30 other volunteers from around the United States on a mission trip to Zimbabwe, a country plagued by unprecedented inflation, extreme poverty and HIV/AIDS.
A March 5 CNN article reported the nation's inflation has soared so high that one U.S. dollar now equals $25 million in Zimbabwean currency. Working in hospitals, orphanages and villages, they will come face-to-face with the hardships of hunger and disease endured by a nation with an 80 percent unemployment rate.
Makenzie Shewcraft, alumna from Paducah, Ky., serves as associate campus minister for the BCM and has been planning the trip since October.
"I knew that I felt called to go to Africa," she said. "I knew that I wanted to go somewhere that I could help people and meet needs and just take hope to them."
Last semester, she met Darren Tipton from DoMissions, a non-profit, faith-based organization that sends youth to Africa and Malaysia for relief work involving AIDS, orphans, education and poverty.
Tipton described Zimbabwe's squalid conditions, offering to lead Shewcraft and any other volunteers on an aid expedition this summer.
"The more he told me about situations in Zimbabwe," Shewcraft said, "the more my heart just broke. I prayed about it a lot, and I knew that's where we were supposed to go. I started telling students about it and watched their hearts develop for it, also."
Once students arrive, they will encounter a country experiencing the effects of a collapsed economy and political corruption.
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