SPECIAL TO THE PVT The Rev. Jeff Taguchi, in the back row at left, former Nye County Commissioner and pastor of the Beatty Community Church, poses in African robes while posing with villagers in Ghana, West Africa. He is pictured with Mary Jane Ponten, 76, of Colorado Springs, a cerebral palsy victim who inspires others. SPECIAL TO THE PVT The Rev. Taguchi found the damage from the late 2004 tsunami in Ceylon mind-boggling. "I have never seen such destruction," he said. Advertisement

BEATTY -- There are three reasons why people are afraid to go on ministries overseas: fear, time and money, according to Jeff Taguchi, national director of Commit Ministries.

Taguchi, a former Nye County Commissioner, has logged plenty of air miles on trips to places ranging from China to Ghana the last four years in his new job.

The main reason they don't go is fear, he said. Their major fear when they go into a poor country is: Where will I go to the bathroom?

"As part of our in-country training one of the instructions we use is how to use the 'squatty potty,'" Taguchi said, during one of his rare moments at home in Beatty.

Taguchi had been the pastor of the Beatty Community Church until 2004 before hitting the road.

"There's more than one time I looked at this flush toilet and I said, 'It's a marvelous thing,' Taguchi said.

Four or five years ago, Taguchi was introduced to Commit Ministries Executive Director Greg Crawford. Taguchi said not enough pastors are sponsoring missions overseas, what he calls the mission of the church to spread the gospel.

"I talked about missions from the pulpit," Crawford said. "It was shocking that pastors weren't talking about missions."

At one mission 25 miles south of Batticaloa, on the east coast of Sri Lanka, Taguchi got to see first hand the effects of the Dec. 26, 2004 tsunami disaster.

"I was in the part that got the brunt of the tsunami," Taguchi said. "It's like someone had taken a giant hand and wiped everything off the chessboard. I have never seen such destruction."

A Sri Lankan pastor had just conducted his second service since becoming ordained when the big wave hit. He was a block and a half from the ocean.

"He and his wife got washed out and his wife couldn't hold onto their year-and-a-half-old daughter and they lost her," Taguchi said. "We went in there and we helped rebuild one of the churches that was there."

"The eastern side of the island, because it was mostly Tamil, it took them longer to get supplies," he said. "Helicopters would hover off the area and just drop the supplies out. They got treated like animals. It was terrible."

But people chipped in and helped everyone out, regardless of their religion, Taguchi said, something the American people could learn from.

"People stepped up to the challenge and are restoring their community the best they can. Then I came back home and I heard about Katrina, the fraud, the credit cards."

Different parishioners with specialties -- doctors, accountants, carpenters -- could help on the overseas missions in projects ranging from a day in northern Mexico to three weeks in Africa, he said.

"We did a medical clinic in Kenya for one day and saw 450 people, and another 400 were waiting," Taguchi said.

He has a soft spot for disabled people in the Third World. Taguchi was accompanied by Heather, his wife of eight months.

"We want to go back to a school for disabled children in Ghana, outside of Accra," Taguchi said. "We want people with disabilities involved in the ministry."

"In Ghana, West Africa, for children with disabilities it's impossible to get an education," he said. "They're not allowed to go to school. So what happens is they're relegated to living off the family.

"If you have a disabled child, your family must have committed some sort of taboo," the people believe.

When Taguchi travels to some countries, like Ghana, he is accompanied by Mary Jane Ponten, 75, a cerebral palsy victim from Colorado Springs, who shows others what can be done. In Ghana he works with the Mephiboshath Ministry.

Local people should participate in the building programs, he said. Foreigners shouldn't just build everything.

"We have tried to make it a true partnership, teach more individuals they did that," he said.

"You give a man a fish, he eats for a day. You teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime," Taguchi said quoting a famous proverb. "Colonialism has really done a number on them. Every white person is always asked for something: Give me this and give me that."

Taguchi left Monday to escort a group of musicians from Phoenix traveling to Chengdu, in China's southwestern state of Szechuan on a sister-city program. Taguchi said he first traveled to China in 1981 when he was part of a Campus Crusade for Christ.

"One of the things I found in China since the open-door policy, it has gone from stone age to space age," Taguchi said. He referred to modern innovations like the Maglev magnetic levitation train in Shanghai. The world's most populous country is also changing spiritually, he said.

"China is the fastest growing Christian nation in the world; 26,000 people ask Jesus into their life every day," Taguchi said.

The Taguchis have been to Khayaga, Kenya, to help out at the Mugomari school, helping children with AIDS and to Kasese, Uganda to do an assessment for a group that wants to build a secondary school there, based on their school in Kenya.

"After 14 years of serving in politics you never stop serving people. I just redirected my energy to going into these foreign nations," Taguchi said.

He would like to bring physical therapists and occupational therapists to a school for children with cerebral palsy in China, sponsored by the Angel House ministry.

The people who go on the overseas missions take back much more spiritually, Taguchi said. One Pahrump resident who came along on an overseas mission was Clayton Payne.

"A lot of people I've taken have never been in a cross-cultural experience," he said. "Life is about you when you grow up in the United States. Then you go overseas and life isn't about me."

"People get a broader world view, they take that back and they put back much more into the community than before because they've seen what people don't have," his wife Heather said.

"You talk to people and they come back with a sense of self-satisfaction. They come back richer, and not financially," Jeff Taguchi said.

"Be ashamed to die unless you've won some victory for humanity," he said. "No man is an island, and being able to do something for humanity is very rewarding to do."

So has he adapted to the inconveniences of the Third World like the "squatty potty?"

"I've camped and hunted for years, so for me it's not that big of a deal," Taguchi said.