Teen Learns About Herself On Mission

Boot camp didn’t deter Julie Morrow.

The weeks without showers. The chiggers burrowing under her skin. Hurricane Bertha.

“I felt like this was my calling,” the Lake City High School junior says. She’s so serious that she looks older than 16. “It was the time in my life I needed to reach out with my faith.”

Boot camp was Julie’s introduction last year to a summer filled with deadly centipedes and crocodiles, flashing machetes and ant snacks.

She had joined a group of teenage missionaries heading for aboriginal territory in Australia.

“I would’ve gone anywhere,” she says. “I had to go with my heart.”

Julie’s pastor at Coeur d’Alene’s First Presbyterian Church gave her a brochure on Teen Missions International a year ago. The organization sends 1,700 kids to work on projects in 55 countries.

Julie had to raise $3,390 for the three-month odyssey that included three weeks in boot camp in Florida. The money wasn’t hard to find.

“I prayed a lot and sent out letters,” she says. “Then people responded. I raised $400 extra.”

She was allowed to bring along only 32 pounds and one pair of shoes - high-top construction boots. A bus picked her up for the cross-country trip in mid-June.

“I wanted to cry because I was really scared,” she says. Instead, her mother cried.

Merritt Island, Fla., was hot, humid and soggy. The boot camp sat on swampland two miles from the Kennedy Space Center. Julie shared a two-person tent that offered little protection from the rain and none from Hurricane Bertha.

Boot camp trained Julie and other teens to work in teams. The kids tackled obstacle courses and walked narrow planks over pits filled with molasses. They washed in cold water and together fought the chiggers that tried to live under their skin. No one quit.

In July, Julie and 31 other kids left Florida for Yirrkala in hot, dry northern Australia. They each carried 40 pounds in canned food in addition to their packs.

About 800 people, most aboriginal, live in the region. The kids were supposed to help on a plantation that supports the aboriginal school.

“Right after our tents went up, people from the town came to tell us which spiders and snakes were poisonous and that centipedes over 3 inches long were deadly,” she says. “I’m thinking, ‘I don’t want to go into the banana fields.”’

But she was assigned to the banana fields. Julie worked eight hours a day stacking bananas other kids had harvested. She helped pour concrete for a new packing shed and build a firewall around the plantation.

She washed in makeshift outdoor showers, ate pounds of peanut butter and carried a machete everywhere to defend herself from crocodiles and dingoes. When ants bit her, she bit back.

“We’d grab them by the head and bite the butt end, and they tasted like candy, kind of sour,” she says. She didn’t try the same trick with the scorpions.

When she hurt her finger, she went to the aboriginal doctor.

“Oh, it was scary,” she says. “There were plastic lawn chairs in the clinic and jars with snakes in them, a cement floor. It was very primitive.”

The locals quickly adopted Julie and her group. They invited the kids to barbecues on the beach where they sang and danced. At one barbecue, the main course was a sea turtle freshly caught.

“I didn’t eat it because the way they cooked it was so odd,” she says. “They threw it alive on the fire.”

In return for the local hospitality, the kids acted out Bible stories.

Julie coped with the critters and back-breaking work at Yirrkala, but halfway through her stay her teammates and her lack of clothes got on her nerves. The kids had to stick together at all times.

To beat the clothes blues, Julie and her friends traded outfits.

“I really learned what situations I could handle and what I need to work on,” Julie says. “I didn’t think I could work eight hours a day all summer, but I did.”

Before she left for home last August, her aboriginal friends gave her necklaces, bracelets, arm guards and a traditional painting of local plants.

She wasn’t home long before she decided to go on another teen mission. In June, she’ll join a backpacking team in the Philippines. The group will travel to fishing villages along the coast and share Bible stories.

“It’s my own way to test myself, see how much I can handle,” she says. “This is what I want to do with my life. Someday I want to be a missionary in a foreign country.”

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