highway tabernacle Mission team details

A team from Highway Tabernacle Church, 3000 S. Raccoon Road, Austintown, recently took a mission trip to Sierra Leone, Africa.

Team members: The Rev. Jonathan Moore, senior pastor, led the team of Jason Bowman, John Ciardi, Andy Eippert, Gene and Helen Helton, Jackie McCullough, Carolyn Moorhead and Chuck Swanson.

Time frame: The Feb. 8-21 trip took some 32 hours, with layovers, with the group leaving from a church service the morning of Feb. 8. They traveled by church bus to Cleveland, then flew to Chicago, London and Freetown, Sierra Leone, the capital. They worked in Freetown and Kono.

Activities: Preached in 18 church services and three children’s crusades, presented 10 community health-education sessions in area schools, spoke to two local police divisions and broadcast on the radio twice.

In country: The team worked alongside missionaries Charles and Kathleen McMillen.

About Sierra Leone: World Vision, a Christian relief and advocacy organization dedicated to working with families and communities to overcome poverty and injustice, describes Sierra Leone as a country with one of the lowest average incomes in the world. Most families don’t have sufficient resources to buy necessities. Most of the population lives in rural farming communities and about two-thirds of the population depends on subsistence farming for survival. A typical family’s diet consists of rice, cassava root and leafy vegetables. They grow barely enough food to feed their families; half of the population is chronically undernourished. Dwellings are mud huts with dirt floors and thatched roofs. Access to health care is severely limited; it has a high maternal mortality rate with one of every 50 births resulting in the mother’s death and 165 infant deaths out of every 1,000 births. The average lifespan is 40 years. School is not mandatory; enrollment is 41 percent in mostly church-sponsored schools.

The team: Mission members sampled some of the local foods including cassava root, a vegetable that Helen Helton compared to a potato. They also ate rice with a peanut sauce, which the team described as delicious. They also visited local markets, buying some souvenirs.