Portersville woman takes part in 3-month mission trip
Ansley Shaffer, 20, of Portersville has been getting a lot of stamps in her passport lately.
The 2017 graduate of Slippery Rock High School took a mission trip to Mexico over Thanksgiving. And that was after getting back from a three-month mission sojourn to the African nation of Zambia from May to August last year.
Her African trip, Shaffer said, came about through Overland Missions, a Cocoa, Fla.-based group that concentrates on taking the Gospel to remote places of the Earth.
“Overland is a mission organization that goes to indigenous people, groups in Zambia, Mozambique, that have never heard the name of Jesus,” said Shaffer.
“Through Overland Missions, I had an advanced mission training program,” she said. “Although, compared to the other people I was with I was a newbie. We joked that maybe one day my passport will be all stamped and raggedy.”
Shaffer said, “Zambia is sort of in the middle of Africa. It's a landlocked country.”
Shaffer was part of a group of 30 that flew from Pittsburgh to London and from there to Johannessburg, South Africa. There the group boarded another plane and flew an hour to Livingston in southern Zambia.
“Livingston was sort of westernized. But we traveled from there (by bus) to a base camp,” she said.
“The 30 of us stayed together at the same base camp. When we went out to the villages, we'd split off into smaller groups of five,” said Shaffer.
“We went out to spread the Gospel. We would spend the day in the village helping them out with their gardening,” she said.
“Gardening is different in Zambia. Rainwater is collected and carried in plastic buckets. It takes five or six trips and can take all day to water the plants,” she said.
The crops were mostly corn and sunflowers. The sunflowers were grown for their oil.
“They (the Zambians) think it is super weird that we are eating sunflower seeds,” she said.
“The people were super friendly and super inviting,” said Shaffer. “They are more people-oriented than time-oriented. It changes the perspective on how we organize our days.”
The climate of Zambia was also surprising. Shaffer said, “The weather was in the 70s and 80s and it was sunny.
“I got a little sunburn but it was really not what I was expecting. I thought I would get a really dark tan,” she said. “At night, it got cold. I bundled up at night. It even frosted one night.”
She said that was probably due to the fact since Zambia is in the Southern Hemisphere, her mission trip was taking place during Zambia's winter.That could be important when your quarters were a tent on a cement slab shared with three women at the base camp and a two-woman tent pitched on the ground during overnight visits to outlying villages.If the people were friendly, the local animals were anything but, she said.“What you had to worry about was poisonous snakes and baboons,” she said.“I think the baboons scared me more. They're three times as strong as a man and as intelligent as a 7-year-old,” she said.“And the leopards would get after the baboons outside the compound. That was the alarm clock every morning,” she said.Smaller wildlife proved to be a problem, too.“There's a lot of spiders there,” Shaffer said. “ I had my jeans on the line, and I was putting my jeans on in the tent and out popped this huge spider. It fell right out of my jeans.”“And there were army ants that you had to watch out for. If they bit you it feels like a bee sting,” she said. And their smaller cousins would get into the group's food and drinks., she added.Not that the food was exceptional.The staple of the Zambian diet is nshima, she said.“It's dried corn, powdered corn,” Shaffer said. “You add water and you stir and you stir it. It turns into something like dried out mashed potatoes.”“They serve it with cabbage, beans and tomatoes,” she said.Zambians also eat a small sardinelike fish called a kapenta.Another source of protein, she said, are “grubs the size of your pinky.”They are usually fried in oil, or boiled for a few minutes then fried in oil.“Yes, I ate them,” she said.But the animals and the weather couldn't deter the group members from their mission to spread the Gospel.“I think the unique thing was to sit down and talk with witch doctors,” she said. “This is where witchcraft is practiced, charms and dark stuff.“And then you see them cutting off their charms after sharing the Gospel,” she added.
She said visits to the villages are part of Overland's plan to convert village leaders to carry on the mission of spreading the Gospel after the Americans have gone home.“Overland doesn't want people to rely on the United States,” said Shaffer. “We want to kick-start them and let them lead Bible studies and spread the Gospel.”The group did spend some time on its last day in Zambia doing some sightseeing.Shaffer said the group traveled to Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River at the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, as well as going on a safari in the neighboring country of Botswana.“I have never seen so many rainbows everywhere,” said Shaffer of her trip to what is considered the largest waterfall in the world. “We must have walked a mile in the mist from them.”Right now, she's living at home with her parents, Heather and Rich Shaffer, and taking classes at Butler County Community College in preparation of attending Slippery Rock University in pursuit of an early special education degree with a concentration in international education.She is already planning her next mission trip to Mexico.In addition to her trips to Mexico and Zambia last year, she has also traveled twice to the Dominican Republic.“I'm loving this. I know I want to do missions outside the United States for the rest of my life, she said.“I've figured that out and now I have to figure out how to get there,” said Shaffer. “I think that's what my 20s are all about.”
4 The territory of Northern Rhodesia was administered by the former British South Africa Company from 1891 until it was taken over by the United Kingdom in 1923. During the 1920s and 1930s, advances in mining spurred development and immigration. The name was changed to Zambia upon independence in 1964.4 Zambia is a landlocked country in southern Africa, east of Angola, and south of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is almost five times the size of Georgia; slightly larger than Texas. The terrain is mostly high plateau with some hills and mountains. The climate is tropical, modified by altitude, with a rainy season running from October to April.4 Zambia has a population of an estimated 16,445,079 as of July 2018. Estimates explicitly take into account the effects of excess mortality due to AIDS; this can result in lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, higher death rates, lower population growth rates, and changes in the distribution of population by age and sex than would otherwise be expected.4 Zambia's poor, youthful population consists primarily of Bantu-speaking people representing nearly 70 different ethnicities. Zambia's high fertility rate continues to drive rapid population growth, averaging almost 3 percent annually between 2000 and 2010.4 The population is divided into Protestant, 75.3 percent, Roman Catholic, 20.2 percent, other, 2.7 percent (includes Muslim Buddhist, Hindu, and Baha'i) and none 1.8 percent.4 Zambia is a presidential republic divided into 10 provinces and governed by a mixed legal system of English common law and customary law.4 Zambia had one of the world's fastest-growing economies for the 10 years up to 2014, with real gross domestic product growth averaging roughly 6.7 percent per year, though growth slowed during the period 2015 to 2017, due to falling copper prices, reduced power generation, and depreciation of the Zambia currency, the kwacha.Zambia's lack of economic diversification and dependency on copper as its sole major export makes it vulnerable to fluctuations in the world commodities market and prices turned downward in 2015 due to declining demand from China.GDP growth picked up in 2017 as mineral prices rose.Despite recent strong economic growth and its status as a lower middle-income country, widespread and extreme rural poverty and high unemployment levels remain significant problems, made worse by a high birth rate, a relatively high HIV/AIDS burden, by market-distorting agricultural and energy policies, and growing government debt.4 In 2004, Zimbabwe dropped objections to plans between Botswana and Zambia to build a bridge over the Zambezi River, thereby de facto recognizing a short, but not clearly delimited, Botswana-Zambia boundary in the river.Zambia serves as a shipment point for moderate amounts of methaqualone, small amounts of heroin and cocaine bound for southern Africa and possibly Europe.<em>CIA World Factbook</em>
