The last year couple of years, the day after Thanksgiving has been tough for American retailers. Thanks to the lingering affects of a recession, “Black Friday” shoppers have been reluctant to spend as much as they did in years past.

But the stores’ troubles were nothing compared to Dr. Sophie Warren’s. The missionary-professor in Nigeria experienced a different sort of Black Friday: “[The blackness] was caused by smoke,” she said, “not numbers in a ledger.”

One day after contentious regional elections, violent riots broke out in the streets near her university campus. Hundreds of homes and churches were burned. Even worse, conservative estimates place the number of people killed by gun- and machete-wielding gangs at 300.

Meanwhile, the home Sophie shared with a missionary couple became a place of refuge for the community. “We cared for about 60 refugees in a house that has three bedrooms,” she said. “I took 60 more children to another house. Then we had 20 or 30 people sleeping in cars in our driveway. The violence was going on in [those people’s] neighborhoods, and they didn’t feel safe.”

Even Sophie’s “safe” residence was less than half a mile away from the violence. She never knew if the marauding gangs might decide to target her makeshift refugee camp. For three days, while the Nigerian army worked to restore order, she and other missionaries struggled to provide food and water for everyone who’d fled to them for protection.

Finally, after several days of martial law—“soldiers were shooting or arresting anyone who walked the streets,” Sophie recalled—order was restored. The refugees cautiously returned to their own homes. Meanwhile, Sophie could go back to the work she’d come to Nigeria to do: educating future teachers studying at the university.

The Trip to Romania

When Sophie began studying Elementary Education in 1998, she never expected her teaching career to be so adventurous. But through a series of short-term missions experiences, God made it clear that Sophie’s original plan of teaching in the United States was not his plan.

Sophie came to the University of Iowa with a religious background. However, it wasn’t until her junior year that she accepted Christ. Then in 2002, she began graduate school to pursue her Ph.D. in Education. “[That’s when] I really started following Christ,” she said. She started striving to make an impact in her community and around the world.

Sophie traveled to Romania with her church in 2003, where the team conducted Vacation Bible School (VBS) for orphans. Abandoned children were a huge problem in Romania. “Ceausescu [the former Communist dictator] put policies in place so parents would have large families,” she explained. However, impoverished parents couldn’t care for their numerous offspring, so the “extra” children were sent to communist institutions. Almost fifteen years after the fall of Ceaucescu, his legacy—tens of thousands of abandoned children—remained.

“The first week of VBS, I was drawn to a twelve-year-old named Giani,” Sophie said. “He taught me a lot about love. He didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak Romanian, but there was definitely a bond there.

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