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Fifty-six years after Sarah Smith first felt called to be a missionary in Africa, she made her first mission trip to Tanzania. On Sunday evening, the 74-year-old Llano resident gave a presentation on her fourth trip to Africa (this time to Kenya) with the idea in the back of her mind that it may be time to “pass the torch” to someone else who feels the same call.

Sarah Smith grew up in Amarillo, and began preparing for the mission field when she was just 14. When she married James Smith, of Llano, and moved to San Antonio, her plans changed only a little. While he worked at Kelly Air Force Base, she worked days at a west side Spanish mission for 29 years (they both worked as volunteers at the mission three nights a week). “I thought that was my Africa,” she recalls, “because it was so hot.” When her husband retired about ten years ago, they moved back to his hometown, Llano.

In 2005, Mrs. Smith attended a special program of the International Commission, a branch of the Southern Baptist Mission Board, describing how volunteers could be temporary missionaries overseas. “I knew immediately,” she says. “That was what I was supposed to do.”

She signed up for a two-week trip that November to Tanzania. “We pay our own expenses,” she explains. “Before we go, we write our testimonies, which are then printed in the native language (Swahili, in this case). Those testimonies, telling what God has done for us, are our main tool.” On her recent trip, participants also used an “Evange-Cube,” illustrated on all sides with pictures explaining the plan of salvation.

Each of the trips takes about a year to plan and organize. Volunteers have pleasant hotel accommodations, and travel by bus to different churches where local members serve as guides, interpreters and companions as they visit from house to house. Mrs. Smith reports that they were very well received almost everywhere, treated courteously and listened to eagerly. “I was a sort of spectacle, being a white woman in an African village,” she recalls. People were glad to listen, and we were able to lead many to the Lord.”

The exception was at a Somali refugee village in Kenya, where a gleaming white mosque towered over the dusty huts, and angry Muslim villagers ordered the Christians to stay away.

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Mrs. Smith’s second trip, last September, was to Kenya; her third was in February with Lynn and Bette Sue Hoy to Sierra Leone, where she visited the Mile 38 Orphanage, for which Llano residents are now collecting aid (local kids at the recent vacation Bible School collected flip-flops to send to the orphanage). Her most recent trip was once again to Kenya, and waiting now for guidance on any future trips. “I’m not getting any signals right now,” she says with a smile. “I’m in good health, but I’m 74 years old. It may be time to pass the torch.” She adds that volunteers of any age are welcome, and says, “I was the oldest one there.”