Ridgeway takes Togo mission trip

Konstantin Vengerowsky/Clarendon Citizen

Most 15-year-olds wouldn’t risk going to a foreign country with a different culture, language and a totally different way of life. Not Maggie Ridgeway, she decided to take a two-week missionary trip to the country of Togo, in West Africa.

“I wanted to experience something completely different,” she said.

Ridgeway is a member of the Seacoast Church in Manning, a non-denominational branch of the 12 Seacoast Churches in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia. With seven members and a youth pastor of a Seacoast Church in Mt. Pleasant, Ridgeway boarded an airplane in Charleston, flew to Washington D.C., Ethiopia, and finally Lomé, Togo. Upon arriving in the country, Ridgeway said that she immediately had to get used to everyone speaking French.

Togo is a 22,000 square mile country (a little smaller than West Virginia) bordered by Ghana to the west, Benin to the east and Burkina Faso to the north. It extends south to the Gulf of Guinea, on which the capital Lomé is located. 

From Lomé, Ridgeway’s group traveled to Djon, a small town, where they would spend most of their 17-day trip. Togo is a tropical, sub-Saharan nation, highly dependent on agriculture with a climate that provides good growing seasons. Ridgeway said that the weather there reminded her of South Carolina.

“It was about 80 degrees while we were there, but just as humid as it is here,” she said.

The group settled into a mission house. They were served mostly American food, such as pasta, bread, and rice. Ridgeway said that she did get to try some of the local flavor, though, such as fried bean cake.

“It was really good,” she said.

A typical day for the young missionaries included getting up in the morning, eating breakfast and then walking around the town’s streets trying to engage people to listen to God’s word. Most of their audience was children.

“They would just come up and grab your hand and walk down the street with you,” Ridgeway said.

She said that the group made special salvation bracelets with five different colored beads. Each color had a different meaning. According to Ridgeway, a green bead stood for the creation, a black bead stood for the sin that separated humans from God, and red represented the blood that Jesus shed when he was crucified for people’s sins. A white bead represented cleansing by the blood of Jesus, and blue stood for the everlasting, eternal life.

“I think the main thing that drew the adults to us was the way we worked with the kids. When they saw how the kids really seemed to trust us they had more respect for what we had to say,” she said.

Ridgeway said that she was really surprised to see how mature some of the children were.

“I saw five and six-year-olds taking care of their one or two-year-old siblings,” she said.

Besides doing open ministries, the group worked at a construction site and helped to put on a soccer tournament. Ridgeway was in the country when the World Cup was taking place on the continent. Although far from South Africa, she said that the streets would erupt in celebration every time a favorite team scored a goal.

Ridgeway said that living conditions in rural Togo are much different from that of rural U.S.

“There are huts made out of trees and very few concrete buildings in the smaller towns,” she said.

Ridgeway said that she was surprised by how embracing the people are there.

“Especially the children, they would run right up to us,” she said.