Being single and on the missions field in a Middle Eastern country may not have been exactly what Pam Johnson had pictured for herself.
However, the realization that that was what God wanted nearly caused her to wreck her car on the way home from meeting with an International Mission Board (IMB) representative.
“I honestly almost ran off the highway,” Johnson said with a smile in her voice. Then, she recalled saying, “But God, I’m single and female.”
Nonetheless, she prayed about it and gained peace. The more she learned about Jordan, “the more I knew I belonged there. … I can’t imagine not going back (home there).”
Johnson is on furlough in Pell City until April, after serving three and one-half years in Jordan.
As it turns out, though, serving in Jordan isn’t what she had expected. She finds that her safety isn’t an issue. In fact, the Jordanian men are very attentive and protective of her.
“I would not be afraid if I broke down on the side of the road at night,” she said, explaining that being female and American both work to her advantage.
“Jordanians love Americans,” she said. In fact, she often gets treated like a “queen bee” because of her nationality. At the same time, “they expect a lot out of me because I’m an American,” she said. Jordan’s small size means that it is relatively easy to find someone who knows the king or someone who knows someone who knows the king.
So the Jordanians don’t understand why Johnson can’t just pick up the phone and call President Clinton to get him to take care of some situation.
Though it is about 98 percent Muslim, “Jordan is just different from the other Middle Eastern countries,” said Johnson.
Contrary to thought, it isn’t an oil exporter. “We have no oil,” she said. “We don’t export anything.”
But what Jordan does have is a basically self-sufficient, agricultural society. Of the six million people, “everybody owns farmland. … Almost everybody grows olives and almonds and fruits,” she continued.
Only within the last few years, she said, has the government begun to privatize some entities, such as telephone service.
Jordanians love large families, which tend to pull together and take care of one another. In Jordan, Johnson stated, there is no such thing as nursing homes because families assume the full responsibility for care.
They’re loving, compassionate and polite, she said. And the hospitality of southerners in the United States pales in comparison to that of the Jordanians.
Johnson’s journey to Jordan began when she accepted Christ as her Savior when she was 9. She grew up attending Mount Pisgah Baptist Church near Pell City and now goes to Cedar Grove Baptist in Leeds (St. Clair Association). She worked at Shocco Springs Conference Center and at WorldSong, an Alabama Woman’s Missionary Union camp and retreat center.
At 18, she began to feel a call to missions. For six or seven years, she worked in Girls in Action camps in Alabama and Florida. It was during that time that she felt called to be a journeyman.
From 1991–93, she served as a journeyman in Venezuela, teaching missionaries’ kids in kindergarten. She felt, then, that career missions was what God wanted for her life.
She returned to the United States and earned a master’s degree in early childhood education from the University of Montevallo, which is where she got her bachelor’s degree also.
She had been assured of her selection for a teaching position at a school in a town near Pell City.
But within five days after the revelation that she would be going to Jordan, Johnson learned that someone else had gotten the teaching job. So the ties that would have kept her in the United States no longer existed. In other words, Johnson said, God worked out the details.
The first year on the missions field was spent in language school in Ajloun, Jordan. She studied Arabic, which she said is the third hardest language to learn because “the grammar is so intense.”
The next year and a half, she was the administrator of Ajloun Baptist School.
The school, she said, began in 1952 and was totally supported by the IMB. However, during her tenure, it was to change from an American administration to a Jordanian one.
“I pretty much worked myself out of a job,” Johnson explained during a presentation at an (international) missions emphasis at Cropwell Baptist Church near Pell City (St. Clair Association).
“The Jordanian Baptist Convention now runs the school,” she continued.
When she returns to Jordan, she’ll take on different responsibilities.
While in the United States, Johnson has been asked frequently to speak or attend conferences.
Otherwise, she is spending time with her nieces and nephews. And she has had to learn to pump her own gas, something she didn’t have to worry with in Jordan because she’s a woman.
One thing she won’t have to worry about when she returns to the country is financial support.
Johnson said she is thankful for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Cooperative Program, which financially undergirds the work of its missionaries on the field.
She is also grateful for the prayer warriors in the family of God.
“We cannot serve on the field,” Johnson said, “without your prayers.”
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