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.

Mary said yes.

She could not have foreseen what lay ahead — the decades she would spend walking barefoot through the Nigerian bush, the hundreds of twin babies she would rescue from death because locals believed twins were cursed, the villages that would come to call her "Ma." She did not know she would stand before tribal chiefs and colonial governors alike, a slight woman with red hair and a Scottish brogue, speaking with an authority that had nothing to do with her station in life.

She only knew she had been asked, and she was willing.