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The Review of Faith & International Affairs

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A LEGACY OF FAITH AND SERVICE

By Kristen J. Leslie Available online: 20 Feb 2012

To cite this article: By Kristen J. Leslie (2012): A LEGACY OF FAITH AND SERVICE, The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 10:1, 47-48 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15570274.2012.648386

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A LEGACY OF FAITH AND SERVICE

By Kristen J. Leslie owo, yowo/ Bonsoir/a va bien/ Merci.1 The Tchokossi children regularly chanted this mischievous rhyme at our group of eight American Operation Crossroads Africa (OCA) volunteers each time we strolled through the village market place. Thirty years ago, in 1982, I spent the summer in Sansanne Mango, Togo as an OCA volunteer. I am a second generation OCA participant; my father, Ohio Wesleyan Chaplain James Leslie,2 led a group to BoboDioulasso, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) in 1968. I grew up seeing photos and hearing stories about his experiences: buying enticing (and hot!) peppers from vendors through the train windows; the market places lled With bolts of colorful cloth and wooden fertility dolls; the priest he befriended in Ouagadougou; the school they built; the West African French colloquialisms; meeting the Rev. James Robinson and learning about his commitment to helping Americans know more about Africa and her people; and the life-long impact my fathers Crossroads experience had on him and the college students with whom he worked. For years after his trip, he helped Ohio Wesleyan students raise money so that they, too, could travel to Africa with Crossroads. OCA affected him deeply and he knew it was important for students to have such a transformational experience. Dads experience made my imagination for Africa and OCA possible.3 I was reared in a family that understood the value of volunteer service and international travel in making one a citizen dedicated to the common

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good. The intertwined notions of service and caring for others were central to my faith. I realized that the more access I had to resources (and the freedom to use them), the greater responsibility I had to do something worthy with them. This is how I understood the parable of the Good Samaritan. No doubt my social and religious values were shaped during the late 1960s and 1970s by parents who were committed to civil rights, womens rights, and ecological sensibilities. At the same time, I understood that international travel could entice me to live in the world differently. As a college student, I wanted to travel internationally without being just another privileged young white woman who watched the world from a youth hostel. I wanted a travel experience that combined my interest in travel, my desire to live with peers who had different cultural experiences, and my faithdriven responsibility to give back. Even then it sounded idealistic, but I knew that there was a way to combine travel and service. I knew it because I grew up hearing my dad talk about his experience with Crossroads. One of the many benets of international volunteer work is being able to experience a new cultural context while seeing with new eyes ones own context and personal history. In her work on the styles of learning that occur in transnational cultural emersion experiences, Mai-Anh Le Tran
The Rev. Dr. Kristen J. Leslie is Professor of Pastoral Theology and Care at Eden Theological Seminary. She is the author of When Violence is No Stranger: Pastoral Counseling with Survivors of Acquaintance Rape (2003). She was an Operation Crossroads Africa volunteer in Togo in 1983.

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writes that while students who travel may expect to see new sights, (that is, newness in what they see) what they often undergo is a re-orientation of how they see (my emphasis).4 For me, seeing old things in a new way gave me clarity to look ahead: while digging in the dirt with OCA colleagues, I decided to pursue a call to professional ministry in the Christian church. We were in our third week at the work site, digging the foundation for a community center. Togolese students were perplexed by these eight American university studentssix women and two menwho were willing to do the daily manual labor of mixing cement to make cinder block bricks and dig the hole for the buildings foundation. On this particular day, Abubakar watched as Kelly, Eugenia, and I dug a trench and talked about our respective families. We shared stories about our siblings, our parents, and our extended families. We talked about what was important to our communities and what was important to us. I do not remember the details of the stories. I do remember that I began to understand my own family in a new way. And it was this new understanding that became the basis for my call to ordained ministry. I recall telling these friends about my family and about the values my parents instilled in me. I could recognize that my nurse mother and my college chaplain father had both been clear examples of caring for those in need and working

for those who were oppressed by unjust systems. In their life choices, I could see how they regularly spoke truth to power and how they had instilled that in their children. I have a clear memory of telling these friends that I believed that the life my parents had chosen and made for their children was admirable and worthy because it made us caring citizens of the world. I remember Abubakara afrming my admiration for my parents and their choices and how among his Tchokossi people this was also important. My parents had encouraged in me a life trajectory that was worthy, and just, and in line with what I understood to be the Gospel message. It was then that I decided that while there were various ways to live out such a worthy life (caring for those in need and working for, with, and on behalf of those who are oppressed), ordained Christian ministry was the way I had seen this done and could envision doing it. I have come to understand this as my call to ministry. I do not believe that God was waiting for me to get to Togo in order to tell me something. I do believe, however, that by living and working in a different cultural context in a way that was consistent with my faith, I was able to inhabit my world differently and thereby gain clarity for my future. Faith, international volunteer service, and a career path came together for me in a most personal waya way made possible by my time with Operation Crossroads Africa. v

1. Yowo is the Tchokossi term for foreigner, while bonsoir (good evening), a va bien (all is well), and merci (thank you) are familiar French phrases that children learn in their earliest formal schooling. 2. Rev. James S. Leslie, PhD, was chaplain at Ohio Wesleyan University (19601988). He led an Operation Crossroads Africa group in 1968. His legacy lives on in the Jim Leslie Center for Peace and Justice at Ohio Wesleyan University. 3. At this time of writing, my father lives with Alzheimers disease and has only vague memories of his time with OCA. Until I can remember no more, I gratefully hold our shared memories and an appreciation for James Robinson and Operation Crossroads Africa. 4. Le Tran, Hic Sunt Dracones, 7.

Reference
Le Tran, Mai-Anh. Hic Sunt Dracones (Here Be Dragons): Global Cartography, Transnational Pedagogy, Religious Formation and Learning. Unpublished article, June, 2011. Used by permission of the author.

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