Ever since she was a young teenager, Shelby Brumfield had a dream. She wanted to go to Africa, to bring to life the tales she had heard from Shirley Richards, a Church of Christ Holiness missionary from Christ Mission Temple in Beaumont, Texas.

A 2009 Franklinton High School graduate, Brumfield, 18, and her cousin, Philisity Thompson, 19, of Beaumont, signed up for the Africa Youth Mission Team, which was sponsored by Christ Mission Temple, Thompson’s church. The trip was organized and chaperoned by the church, but the participants were responsible for raising the funds necessary to pay for their travel and expenses for the two-week trip.

The girls found ways to raise money, from raffling off donated items to selling and delivering catfish plates. They also asked friends, relatives and church members for donations, and with the help of their communities, they prepared to leave for Africa.

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On June 30 they flew to John F. Kennedy Airport in New York and from there to Ghana, West Africa. As luck would have it, they arrived a week before President Obama and his family were set to visit. The group saw first-hand all the preparations being made to welcome the U.S. president to Africa and the city of Accra, an honor no one there had envisioned ever being bestowed on such a small town in Ghana.

The next stop on their journey evoked quite different emotions than the celebratory feelings they had in Accra. They arrived in Cape Coast and were given a tour through the slave castle there, a grim reminder of the slave trade carried on there in the 18th and 19th centuries.

“It was a very sobering experience,” said Brumfield. “It was very bad. They took us into the dungeons where they kept the slaves and it still smelled, like they were still there.”

After leaving the castle, they were treated to a day of fun by a local church, where they were greeted by 55 children eager to interact with the visitors from America. Shelby and the group sang songs, played games, handed out gifts and toys and were treated to refreshments before they set out to see more of the African continent.

A high point of the journey was an opportunity to meet and greet the president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. According to Brumfield, Richards did most of the talking, but she and cousin Philisity were able to give President Sirleaf personal accounts of their trip and the missionary work they were involved with while in Liberia.

“The visit was great – a wonderful experience,” said Brumfield.

As part of their visit they were able to pass out goggles to many of the workers in a nearby rock quarry so as to help save their eyes from damage resulting from debris from the mining process. What really struck Brumfield was the fact that the quarry workers earned enough in one day to buy just one cup of rice, something she said put her life in America in a different light.

“This experience has made me see that I don’t really need all the things I have,” she said, with the emphasis on “things.” “Cell phones – I don’t really need a lot of things I take for granted. And I see how much food we waste here in America,” she continued. The trip, she said, was life-changing.

Shelby will be off to school in late August, where she will be a freshman at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond studying accounting. After graduation, she said, she’d like to go back to Africa, perhaps on one of Richards’s thrice-yearly missionary trips, to try to help those who are so much less fortunate than she. And perhaps the tales she will tell will prompt other young people to dream, as she once did, of going to Africa, a dream that, in the end, changed her life forever.