BY BRITTNEE NAVE

STAR CORRESPONDENT

Laban Carrier has been sharing the word of God internationally since he left for Africa last summer.

Carrier, an Elizabethton native, left home in May of 2019 to do missionary work in Africa. For him, this decision came from a lifelong love of God and a feeling of needing to do more.

“From a young age, I was introduced to God’s love for us all,” he said. “After many years of receiving nothing but his love, I felt his calling on my life to do more and that led me to look into missions trips. From my search, I found an organization called Adventures in Missions. I ended up going to Africa through the organization.”

According to Carrier, during time in Swaziland, a small monarchy in Southern Africa, he not only taught but also learned from orphaned children.

“I have had many great moments, but my favorite was playing with the children in Swaziland,” he said. ”Swaziland is known for being a country of orphans, with most of the parents being wiped out from AIDS. Even though the children grow up without parents and they live in extreme poverty, they are the most joyful people I have ever come across. Even though I was there to minister to them, they were the ones to minister to me, showing me the true joy that God created us to have.”

After leaving Swaziland, Carrier worked in South Africa where he helped start a community soup kitchen. He also joined a nine-month entrepreneurship missions organization called Global U, which helped him learn how to start businesses and help out local small businesses in different areas of the world.

By September of 2019, his travels led him to Spain, where despite the country being a tourist destination, is also a spot for human trafficking. From there he went to Morocco.

Carrier is now in Thailand, and will soon be heading to Nicaragua and Guatemala until June.

While Carrier has a variety of work he does, he has three main priorities.

“I do an abundance of things but the three main priorities I have: discipleship of other young Christian missionaries, kids ministry and helping local shopkeepers improve their businesses and using that to help out their local communities,” he said.

According to Carrier, despite the separation from home being hard, he believes anyone feeling a similar calling to do missionary work should do so.

“Being a missionary away from home is a lot harder than I ever imagined, but a lot more rewarding than I ever imagined,” he said. ”If you feel God calling you to become an overseas missionary then do it. The best thing to do is take action, and talk to people that have done it before.”

Carrier is set to return home in June of this year, with the possibility of leaving again this October and returning next summer.

Carrier is documenting his travels and his story, on his website, www.labancarrier.org.

For more information on Carrier and his journey, you can go to his website or contact him on his Facebook profile of the same name. For more information on Adventures in Missions and Global U, you can go to www.adventures.org and www.theglobalu.org, respectively.