Over spring break, eight of us varsity basketball players, along with three managers, five of our dads, and Coach Brown, went to the Dominican Republic on a mission trip with Score International. Before going on this trip, we truly had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.
Walker Mathis ‘24 shares his testimony in the Dominican Republic. Photo via Pierce Smith ‘27
During our meeting in the fall, Coach Brown had just told us that we would be playing four basketball games there and doing missionary work for the local community, and that it would count as our intercultural experience. We didn’t know until the day before we left for the trip that the teams we would be playing were semi-professional teams. We didn’t arrive in the Dominican Republic until late Saturday night, so we still did not know what to expect.
Sunday morning came, and all eighteen of us, plus our translator, loaded into a bus to go to a local church. This church service was very cool to experience, as these people were extremely welcoming and accommodating to us along with thanking us for coming to share the Gospel with their local communities even though we had never met them before.
Every night, we would all meet together and discuss how the day went for all of us and if anything stood out about the day. It was funny because that night Gene Fitzgerald, our liaison, told us, “What you will find on these types of trips is that you will somehow come to these places to give yet somehow you feel as if you have gotten more back than what you could ever give to begin with.”
I remember that when he said this, some of the other guys and I didn’t believe him, yet every night during these meetings when we talked about who we blessed that day versus who blessed us, somehow we would always be talking about people who blessed us more than about people that we had maybe blessed.
While we were down there, two of the days we took groceries to two of the hundreds of sugarcane villages that were located near us. We did this because these communities are impoverished; most of them are Haitian refugees brought into the Dominican by the sugarcane companies since they are able to pay them less. They do not have to pay taxes to the Dominican government.
One day, we went to a different sugarcane village and played games with the elementary kids for hours. Another day, we went to an elementary school in the city to do a basketball clinic for the kids, yet it quickly just turned into us playing games with the kids as the whole school was let out for recess and the courts were quickly filled with close to 200 kids.
Even though that day didn't go according to plan, it was still special because Walker Mathis was able to share how the Gospel has affected his life, along with our translator being able to share the Gospel with a group of kids that ended up being four times more attended than what we originally planned.