Greenville native talks with teen girls about life, sharing Jesus in West African village

Zeinabou’s life was all about community but not so much about Jesus.

She spent her time sweeping her dirt yard, chatting with her neighbors and hoping for a good rainy season so there would be food. She spent many a day at baby-naming ceremonies, big parties during which people would sacrifice sheep and a Muslim priest would pray a blessing over a newborn.

Then two white girls moved into her village in the West African country of Niger and gave her cassette tapes about someone named Jesus.

And everything changed. But not just for Zeinabou.

A lot of people saw great change in themselves and the village during the four years that Brandy Nelson, a Greenville native, served there as an International Mission Board (IMB) representative.

“When I was about your age, God changed my life,” she told a group of teenage girls March 12 during the Complete event.

God began to work on her about going overseas to serve, and Nelson, a graduate of the University of Mobile, eventually followed that call to Niger.

Now she’s looking at where she might go next. Her fiance feels called overseas, too.

But where she goes isn’t the most important thing, Nelson told the girls. “It’s not about going overseas — it’s about being open to what God wants.”

And what God wanted for her was to spend her early 20s living in a concrete block house in a little village 17 miles from Niger’s capital city, she said.

“We signed up for a mud hut with no running water, but what we got was a concrete block house with a ceiling and running water,” Nelson said when one girl asked about her living conditions.

“We were ready to do what we needed to do, but we were thankful for Lottie Moon (Christmas Offering) providing that little house for us,” she said with a laugh.

But when it was hot, Nelson and her IMB teammate spent their nights sleeping out in the yard — “and it was hot nine months out of the year,” she said.

The sun beats down on the village, which sits squarely in the Sahara Desert with temperatures cruising up around the 130s. The people there associate cool with heaven, Nelson explained.

“A poll came out recently that said Niger was the worst country in the world to live in,” she said. “The people there — they suffer. They do. It’s just by God’s grace that they live.”

Many of them wonder where their next meal will come from, if they will have enough water to live or if their children will live past infancy. But Jesus brings them hope, Nelson explained.

“So many times, I looked at the situation there and thought, ‘God, you’ve forsaken this place.’ But He hasn’t. They are no less important to Him than we are.”