Thirty-two Beacons and eight staff members from campus will do mission work this summer in Central America and Asia.
“My hope is that each student who participates in one of these trips will come away with a world that is both smaller and bigger,” said Jennifer Little, NCU’s Resident Director and Coordinator for Campus Ministry. “Smaller, through building relationships across language and cultural barriers to find that we’re not all that different. And bigger, by having their eyes opened to the realities that many in 3rd world and developing countries face daily.”
The first team left campus on Sun., May 7, to spend 23 days in Cambodia to support church planting in rural villages in northwest Cambodia (former Khmer Rouge territory), as well as partner with and encourage organizations such as Agape International Mission and Rapha House who are fighting human trafficking specifically of prepubescent girls. This is NCU’s seventh mission trip to Cambodia.
NCU students and staff will be in Tijuana, Mexico May 13 to 21 partnering with Puente de Amistad, an organization that provides a smorgasbord of service opportunities to visiting teams. This will be NCU’s ninth year ministering in AIDS hospices, men’s and women’s drug rehabs, orphanages, and impoverished neighborhoods.
The final NCU mission trip for the summer is June 10-18. Students will work in Managua, Nicaragua. They will work with Forward Edge at Villa Esperanza, helping girls that would be trafficked at local landfills.
Villa Esperanza is a community school that provides nutritious meals, home with clean bed and clothes, education, safe drinking water, medical/psychological care, and vocational training within a Christian environment. This is the second year that NCU students will hang out with the girls at the Villa, lead a Vacation Bible School, help clean up the school grounds, repair their facilities, and put on a soccer clinic.