SMs Bring the Students Home
From locales halfway around the world, student missionaries sometimes unexpectedly bring home more than memories.
Cortney Needham, senior theology major, served for two years as a student missionary in Yap.
Originally a student at Peninsula Community College in Port Angeles, Wash., her desire to serve as a student missionary led her to the General Conference Student Missions Department where she arranged to go to Yap, a small Micronesian island in the South Pacific. Once there, she found herself serving with many student missionaries, a number of whom were from WWC.
As a teacher in Yap, Needham loved her job but felt isolated from the rest of the world. Friendships with fellow student missionaries helped and she loved getting letters and packages from home.
“Everybody from WWC received a lot more mailings. They were checked on more often and [the Student Missions office] made sure they had a great Christmas,” says Needham.
When Needham met Jeanne Vories, WWC’s director of student missions, at a student missions orientation session in Hawaii, they quickly formed a friendship.
Vories added Needham to the WWC student missionary mailing list. Their ensuing friendship led Needham to apply for and receive assistance from the Shannon Bigger Memorial Fund, which awards scholarships to returning student missionaries. (The scholarship was established in memory of a former student missionary to Yap.) At the end of her service in Yap, Needham came home and transferred to WWC.
“Because Jeanne and WWC showed so much personal interest in me, I decided to go here,” Needham says. Needham’s experience may also explain why the care that the WWC Student Missions Office shows to its student missionaries impressed several student missionaries from other colleges to transfer to WWC.
The last two years have brought even more joy to Needham as one of her high school students from Yap, Jemina Gilmar, is now studying business at WWC.
“There are five students here from Yap and the primary reason is their parents felt secure in knowing that those of us who had been student missionaries at Yap would help them get through the year here at Walla Walla College,” says Needham.
