The Factory Girl Who Said "I Will Go

In 1876, a twenty-eight-year-old factory worker named Mary Slessor sat in a Presbyterian church in Dundee, Scotland, and heard a call she could not explain. She had worked in the jute mills since she was eleven, her hands rough from the looms, her education cobbled together from borrowed books. She had no training, no connections, no money. The mission board wanted volunteers for Calabar, on the fever-ridden coast of West Africa — a place where European missionaries routinely died within months of arrival.…