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Student answers the call

Courtesy of BRANDON PROCTOR

Brandon Proctor, a senior at Gaither High School, sits with a baby in a remote village in the West African country Burkina Faso.

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By COURTNEY CAIRNS PASTOR By COURTNEY CAIRNS PASTOR

cpastor@tampatrib.com cpastor@tampatrib.com

Published: August 5, 2009

CARROLLWOOD - Brandon Proctor, who will be a senior at Gaither High, lives in a suburban house with his mother and grandparents, where he navigates traffic on Dale Mabry, uploads photos from his digital camera and meets school club officers at Starbucks.

But for the past two years, he has dedicated months from his summer break to missionary work in West Africa.

His hut was a luxury compared to where the local tribe slept but offered no running water or electricity. He plucked the wings from termites to prepare them to eat, dug a trench in 100-degree heat to stop the tribal chief's field from flooding and tried to keep up his strength during two bouts of malaria.

It's enough to convince the 17-year-old to turn it into full-time work.

"I knew the Lord was calling me," he said. "Now I know the Lord is calling me to international missions as a career."

A member of Idlewild Baptist Church and a student leader at Gaither, Proctor recently received attention for his activities, which revolve around school and church.

In June, the Ryan Nece Foundation awarded him a $2,000 college scholarship as the Hillsborough County Good Samaritan for the year. The former Buccaneer's foundation uses nominations from teachers and guidance counselors to select Hillsborough and Pinellas County high school students monthly as Good Samaritans. At the end of the school year, the foundation gives scholarships to one of the monthly winners from each county.

Proctor also received a 2009 SERVE All-Star of Education award for his school and community volunteering.

He has held leadership positions with Gaither's Student Advisory Committee, the PTSA Student Ambassadors, Humanitarian Outreach and Awareness and Legacy and served on the school board's Citizens Advisory Committee. He organized blood drives and volunteered with the student ministry at Idlewild.

It takes up a lot of time, he said, but he loves it so much he doesn't notice. This year will get even busier as he applies to colleges. Proctor hopes to major in international and cultural studies and later enroll in seminary.

His first mission trip was with a group from Idlewild to the Dominican Republic. They stayed in a hotel. They had running water. They muddled through with basic Spanish.

But then he heard a missionary family visiting his church talk about their work in Burkina Faso, a country about the size of Colorado that sits north of Ghana. Something clicked with Proctor. He prayed and prayed and concluded he had to go.

Through the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board, he organized and raised money for the trip. He traveled by himself, linking with missionaries when he arrived and spent five weeks in a village in the African bush last year. This year, he returned to the same village for six weeks. He brought gifts to the chief, such as baby formula or a bag of rice, and lived among the Wala tribe.

He immersed himself in their culture, dressing like they did and attempting to speak the native language, Walai. A passage from Luke guided his approach - he should introduce himself by saying "May God's peace be on this house," according to the Bible, and eat and drink what was offered. Proctor would start with "God bless this house" in Arabic and typically people would welcome him inside.

Most days started at 5 a.m., when the sounds of roosters and donkeys would wake him. Breakfast was a sorghum paste. The men would go to work on farms, and Proctor could go along if invited. Otherwise, he would hang out with the women and children, helping them or doing service work around the village.

At night, the men would gather for tea with Proctor. They had to establish relationships before getting into discussions of religion. Proctor is Christian, and most of the tribe followed a mix of African animism and Islam. They would ask "what news do you bring us" and talked about similar beliefs, such as Jesus Christ as a prophet and different thoughts about his role.

Proctor relied on another missionary to interpret his comments into French, Burkina Faso's official language. Someone else would translate from French into Walai.

Proctor loved meeting the Wala people, who he called humble but welcoming, and he continues to pray for them though he is back in Tampa. He doesn't know where his next trip will take him but thinks it could be another part of Africa. He will know the right location after prayer and finding peace in his heart, he said.

"You can't say 'I want to see Africa. Let's call it a mission trip,'

" he said. "Right now, I don't know where the Lord is calling me. I have a love for the African people. I have a heart for the Muslim people."

Reporter Courtney Cairns Pastor can be reached at (727) 451-2343.

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