“It wasn’t a small faith training for me” – a missionary moment

GOD’S SUSTENANCE IN DUKKAWA

I was posted in a mission school among an unreached tribe for my second missionary journey, for 2 years. For lack of staff, I had so much in my job description. I was the class teacher for the basic class (primary 1) and a two subjects teacher. My pupils were local children who came from very interior places; some had never seen vehicles before. The main mode of transportation for distant journeys was camels, which every well-off family had. You can imagine how tedious it was to make sure the kids were able to speak English in their second term and able to read 3- to 4-letter words as the benchmark for their graduation into the next class. This was my most difficult duty.

I had other job descriptions:  the school accountant, the school driver, the school football coach, the dorm parent for the boys hostel, and the Bible study/devotion leader for primary 6 and primary 3. These duties kept me busy from 5:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m. daily without time to even make my own food.

I was a new missionary, not even having one year on the field, working with an agency that didn’t pay salaries nor stipend. I lived totally by faith, trusting God to meet every need.  Over 4 months, I received just less than 8,000 Nigerian Naira – an equivalent of US$6. As the school accountant, I was paying out the support which came in for my senior colleagues; some were receiving tens and hundreds of thousands but for me nothing was coming from the outside.

This was because the local church which I was with before joining the mission didn’t believe in cross-cultural missions and were not willing to give support, although they later understood and changed.

However, the Lord sustained me through the students’ kitchen. I was permitted by the school head to eat from the children’s pot for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This was humbling because the other staff did not have to do it, but the Lord revealed to me that he wanted me to eat from that source until he got back to me. It was a real experience for me because the food wasn’t like the kind I was used to, being an easterner from Igbo stock who are great cooks and care so much about the quality of our food.  This place, on the other hand, was a far northern part of Nigeria with a different quality of food. But the Lord used it to sustain me there for 2 years.

After 2 years, he led me away with another team to pioneer a new mission field in the Islamic headquarters of the Nigerian Sokoto Caliphate. In this new frontier, everything changed. I got married, and then had partners and friends who then began to send periodic funds to support what we do and us as missionaries. But at Dukkawa in Niger state, it wasn’t a small faith training for me.

Bro Ugochukwu G.U. is a missionary with CAPRO reaching the northern migrant Muslims in the diaspora in Eastern Nigeria.