For over a century, Westminster College graduates have been serving as missionaries in Africa. But never has anyone served in such a way as this year.

This summer, Westminster people traveled to Kenya to help to build a 40-foot high ropes course designed to instill trust and cooperation among people. The high ropes course is believed to be the first built in Africa

Steven Montgomery, program director of Titan Traverse at Westminster College, designed the ropes course for the Rev. Tim Fairman, director of the Doulos Leaders in Service program at the Daystar University in Kenya and 1968 Westminster graduate.

"Ropes allow students to experience life from a different angle," said Montgomery. "The Doulos program has an opportunity to transform leaders who graduate from this university to practice life differently. It has the opportunity to be a beacon on a hill in experiential education."

"For me, the goal of this project was a leadership program in which students could get their hands dirty for Christ," said Rev. Fairman. "This high challenge ropes course is a valuable addition to an area we call Freedom Base.' It's build on a ten-acre site that was formerly a British prison camp for Kenyan freedom fighters during the 1950s."

Also traveling to Kenya this summer was Carla VanDale, a 1986 graduate of Westminster College, and her husband Robert, director of the Peace and Conflict Resolution Center at Westminster College. They went as advisors to the New Wilmington Missionary Conference American Summer Service Team, which is a group of college students who give up their summer to service.

While in Kenya the VanDales helped to build ropes course along with four American students, 12 Kenyan students, Montgomery, Fairman, and his wife, Sue Anne, a 1969 graduate of Westminster College.

The team unloaded the wooden poles from the truck without the use of cranes. With the help of hand-held guide wires and a contraption that looks like an old-fashioned laundry line prop, the team raised the 40-foot poles into the hand-dug holes inches at a time.

"I did hammering of the heavy climbing staples into the poles, carried water for the cement, and weaved the ropes for the nets," said Carla VanDale.

And when the project was finished, the builders tested the course and went on to serve with the Missionaries of Charity at Mother Teresa's Home for the Destitute and Dying nearby.

"The orphanage is an oasis in a place of poverty and garbage," Carla said. "One Section of the school has kids who come in from the city to go to school and get a free lunch. Some children bring plastic bags to put the lunch in so they can share it with their family."

"I've been volunteering since 1990. It's a home for abandoned women and children," said Sue Anne Fairman. "Many of the women who are there are dying from disease, mainly AIDS."

"I got a new kind of respect for the kind of thing Tim and Sue Anne are doing," said Robert VanDale. "Most of the students saw this as a life-transforming experience, and could see a role in this work for America. They go back to their homes and find themselves investigating their lives and more aware of what the rest of the world is like."