HARRISTOWN - Most 12-year-olds, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, have glamorous dreams: a basketball player or a pop music star.

At 12, Brogan McKinney said she wanted to be a missionary in Africa.

Now she's almost 18, her birthday is in March, and on Jan. 11, she leaves for Ethiopia to teach English and minister to children in an orphanage there for eight months. Friends plan a going-away party and open house for her 6 to 8 p.m. Friday at the Harristown Township Building.

Brogan is the oldest of six children, several of them adopted, including a new sister on her way to the United States from China. Her parents, Dale and Ann, are raising their growing family to be devoted to Christ, and the trip to Ethiopia won't be Brogan's first mission trip, though it will be her first solo venture and the farthest. The adult McKinneys have served in Peru, and the family went to Haiti together for a mission trip when Brogan was 10.

Ethiopia is a primitive society to send one's firstborn off to alone.

"Of course, I worry about her. I'm her mom," Ann McKinney said with a laugh. "I guess I just feel that if I trust God to get her back and forth to work every day, I have to trust him when she's farther away, too."

But neither mom nor dad would dream of holding her back, Dale McKinney said, because they believe with Brogan that she's been called to the mission field by God.

"I'll be working in a school and also on the weekends, I'll be teaching Sunday school and helping with the churches and stuff like that," Brogan said.

Becoming a missionary has been on her mind since she was about 7, and she has long wanted to see Africa, she said. When the chance came along to do both, she had to take it. The sponsoring organization is Michigan-based Blessing the Children International (www.blessingthechildren.org), whose primary mission is orphans and widows in Ethiopia.

According to the organization, AIDS is responsible for 20 percent of the 4 million orphans in Ethiopia, and with no government programs to care for orphaned children, those without extended family to take them in usually end up begging.

Blessing the Children is building a compound that will serve as a school, a community center with education and services for adults and children, and a headquarters for matching orphans with foster and adoptive families. Classes will be taught in English.

Brogan had planned to work in Chicago with inner-city children but was told she's too young, she said. She'd done some Internet research for charitable organizations to offer her services to, and Blessing the Children e-mailed her to ask if she'd work for them. The only skill requirements are a willing heart and fluency in English.

She's had some experience teaching because all the McKinney children are homeschooled, and she's helped with her younger siblings' lessons.

When she returns from Ethiopia, she hopes to attend Olivet Nazarene University in Kankakee to study nursing, and after finishing school and gaining some work experience, she wants to return to Africa as a nurse.

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