Family shares their faith overseas

ON A MISSION—The Copeland family—dad Norm, mom Debra, and their sons, 3-year-old Canaan and 14-month-old Emmaus—pictured at a local beach, are missionaries in West Africa. However, political instability in Guinea has kept the Copelands in Camarillo, where they are speaking to church groups about their experiences as missionaries. Debra Copeland watched the children’s faces light up as she spoke to classes at Trinity Presbyterian Church.

Copeland, a Camarillo native, and her husband, Norm, have had the chance to experience a life and culture different than their own in their work as missionaries in Guinea, Africa. Now the couple are sharing stories of their missionary work with church groups around Ventura County.

Political strife in Guinea has led them back to the United States. The Copelands, who are staying with Debra’s parents in Camarillo, are taking advantage of their return by spending time with family and friends, as well as speaking to local churches while they prepare for their next adventure.

One of those speaking engagements took them to Trinity Presbyterian Church in January. On a Sunday morning, they spoke to two classes of children ages 4 to 8 and then returned in the evening for the high school youth group.

The Copeland’s held the younger children’s attention with talk of the different varieties of animals living in Guinea. Debra asked how many languages the children thought there were in the world.

One child guessed 20. Debra laughed and said it’s closer to 7,000. The children were dumbfounded, she said.

“It was a pretty neat opportunity,” Norm said.

The Copelands showed the high school students a movie about Awayo, a man who found God in Papua. Afterward, some of the teens asked the couple about getting involved in missionary work.

Their passion for missionary work began early in life.

Debra’s grandparents were missionaries in the Philippines, and her mother spent time there when she was growing up. When she was young, Debra had the chance to go on a mission trip to Russia with her sisters.

Norm, who’s from Canada, went on a mission trip to Brazil as a high school student in 2000.

The pair met while attending New Tribes Bible Institute in Jackson, Mich., in 2001. They began dating their second year there, and after completing the first two years of the program, continued their studies at the New Tribes Mission training center in Durham, Ontario, where they studied cross-cultural communication, church planting and linguistic analysis.

Norm and Debra married in 2004. Their first son, Canaan, was born in 2006. The couple’s studies with NTM continued; they graduated in 2007 and went on a five-week trip to Guinea, Africa.

The trip proved to them that Guinea was where they were meant to be.

NTM trains missionaries to bring Christianity to people with no knowlegde of the religion. Missionaries go to African countries and learn the tribal languages and gain an understanding of the culture so that they can teach the religion in a language and method that the people can relate to.

When Norm and Debra visited Guinea, they saw a need for help. Missionaries in the tribes need workers in the capital city of Conakry, Guinea, to take care of government paperwork and restock their supplies so they can focus on teaching.

The couple moved there in August 2009. NTM pairs missionaries with a host family so that they can become immersed in the culture.

The couple’s cultural adjustment began almost immediately.

Guinea is one of the least developed countries in West Africa, and residents only get 12 hours of electricity every other day on a schedule that wasn’t always followed, Norm said. The family used batteries and a generator to supplement the electricity they received.

The food also required an adjustment. The people there eat large amounts of rice and make sauces to go along with it, Debra said. She said eggplant and fish are also popular.

“Living there is totally different than living here,” Norm said. “All the little things we’re used to doing here without even thinking take a lot of thought and effort over there, and so we had to learn brand-new how to live.”

The couple had been learning French and continued their studies there. The two immersed themselves in the culture and one day attended two Guinean weddings.

The family suffered a setback when Debra and her two sons— Canaan,3, and Emmaus, 1— contracted malaria. They recovered with medication.

“That knocked them out for a few weeks,” Norm said.

Political instability in the region soon left the family relegated to their host home for safety reasons. They eventually had to leave and returned to Camarillo at the end of October.

Before the family left, they bought round-trip tickets, believing the situation would be resolved and they could return, but the instability remains. In early December, there was an assassination attempt on the president of Guinea.

“If we didn’t have our two little boys, we would have probably tried to stick it out a little bit longer, but with our two sons we figured with all that was going on it would probably be best if we just came back and tried to wait it out for a little instead of putting them into unnecessary danger or insecurity,” Debra said.

The family is hoping to go to Senegal, a country north of Guinea with a similar culture, in a few months.

They have used the time back home to continue studying, speaking to local church groups and enjoying time with family, including a trip over the holidays to see Norm’s family in Canada.

“I look at each day we’re together as a blessing,” Debra said.

Follow the family’s travels at copelandramblings.com.