Geneva Volleyball Player Joins Different Team in Africa - Geneva College
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Geneva Volleyball Player Joins Different Team in Africa

Hayes

HayesGrace Hayes, senior outside hitter from Westminster, Maryland on the volleyball team had an exciting summer. While many student-athletes spend their summers earning money and working out, Hayes spent four weeks in villages in Ghana on a medical mission trip with a team of doctors and students.  

“I knew I wanted to use my stipend from the freshman honors program and I wanted to apply it to something like this,” explains Grace.

Grace, who is starting to apply to graduate schools to become a Physicians Assistant, wanted to spend her summer learning about the medical profession but had trouble finding a medical mission that you involved students.

“A lot of the ones I was finding you already had to be a medical professional. So I ended up googling medical mission internship and this organization popped up and I read about them and read about their trip and it sounded really great so I applied,” she says.

Grace is not new to missions, having traveled to Costa Rica with her church, to Ukraine with her mother, and to several different locations around the USA. This trip, however, was different than past trips that she had taken.

“I got to apply a lot of the knowledge that I have learned through my bio courses at Geneva. I got to do something on a mission trip that I want to do for the rest of my life, which made it more fulfilling in a way. I also got to see a lot of interesting things that I wouldn’t get to see on a normal mission trip,” Grace explains.

Grace was one of five college students serving as medical interns and three doctors on the medical team. They spent a week at a time in different areas of the country, setting up their temporary clinic each day, sleeping in hotels and traveling to rural villages by dirt road. Grace spent her days taking vital signs for patients, educating Ghanaians on how to take their medicine and shadowing the doctors.

“We would usually work until about 4 o’clock and then we would drive back to the hotel, have dinner there and then have bible study or have debriefing time before going to bed,” she recalls.

Grace most enjoyed gaining hands on knowledge of the medical profession and learning from the doctors.

“My favorite part of the trip was sitting with the doctors and shadowing them. They were really knowledgeable, very willing to teach us and to tell us things that we wouldn’t have known otherwise,” Grace says. “They really involved us in the patient care.”

The trip was not all about medical assistance though. The team partnered with Theovision, an organization that is working to translate the Bible into indigenous African languages. The translation is then recorded onto small, solar powered, listening devices. Theovision works with locals to lead the bible listening clubs and to minister to others in the village.

“In all the villages that we were in Theovision had started Bible listening clubs. Each night they would play a chapter of the Bible and discuss it,” she recollects. “We got to attend one of those which was really cool.”

Grace continues, “The whole time we were there we had those local Theo Vision people with us, helping at the clinic. They were our liaisons and we got to know them really well. They were local Ghanaian people who were really inspirational.”

As a returning volleyball letterman, Grace could have been frustrated by obstacles to training during the month of the summer she was on the mission trip in Ghana, however, she was not deterred.

“You couldn’t really run when I was down there,” she says. “You would have to go in a group and there weren’t always people to go with. You had to go in the morning and there wasn’t always time. I definitely didn’t get as many work outs in as I did when I was here. But that just meant that when I was home two weeks before preseason started, I just had to work that much harder to get back in shape.”

Now that Grace is back working with the volleyball team, she can see that her trip impacted her for the better as a student, as a Christian and as a future medical professional but also as an athlete and member of a team.

“I think I can bring a broader perspective of the world to the team. I did get to play some volleyball while I was down there with some local Ghanaian people. It was cool to see how the game was the same no matter where you go. It is the same pass, set, hit,” she declares.

Grace concludes that the trip taught her better how to incorporate her faith into the medical field.

“It has really shown me how to provide Christ centered medical care,” she says. “Even though it was outside the US and a different situation than I would find myself in here in the US, it was a really good example of how to provide genuine medical care while incorporating the gospel. I learned a lot about medicine and biology that I didn’t know before.”

Aug 24, 2016