FOLEY, Ala. — When you travel from the city of Foley to Georgia — the country, not the state — you will be in for an experience of a lifetime.

Wendy Callaway, a nurse at South Baldwin Regional Medical Center, flew out of Atlanta, Ga. with a medical team to bring medical supplies to needy residents of the county of Georgia. The trip was organized through Jonesboro First Baptist Church, which is located in a suburb south of Atlanta and is the church Callaway, now a Foley resident, attended when she was a kid.

The trip lasted from Feb. 2 to Feb. 11, and the team spent five days in the foreign land. Callaway worked Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

One of the cities she visited was Tblisi, the capitol of the country, and she did most of her work in the city of Gori. Callaway said there were many refugee camps around the areas due to the bombings the country endured a few years ago when Russia invaded.

“The need is medicine. They don’t have access to buildings or supplies,” Callaway said. “We’ll prescribe whatever medication we have to give.

They’re not getting re-fills. We’re just saying, ‘Hey, we love you and care about you.’ It’s not about a religion or anything. It’s just showing love.”

There is a local missionary in the country, and they have contact with the Atlanta-based church. When they expressed the need for a medical team, Callaway got word and joined.

“That was the first time a medical team has ever been in the area we were in. They’ve had construction teams before, but never a medical team,” she said. “They want us to come back again next year.”

Callaway will say the trip started as a medical mission — which she has been on before — but it turned into an experience that she will never forget because of the people she met, the friends she made and the impact a small amount of care could have on an individual. The residents, she said, just “needed love” and affection from the volunteers.

There were a few obstacles in the team’s quest to reach the residents with medicine.

“When we got to the airport, our medical supplies were confiscated. We had no medicine when we got there,” she said, noting “political red tape” as the reason for the confiscation of supplies.

This set her and the team back a bit, and they had to go to a nearby pharmacy to buy as much medicine as the team could afford. It was not as much medicine as the team planned to bring, but it was a start. However, Callaway said she only worked as a nurse one out of the five days. The other days she worked as an evangelist.

“Usually, I’m always a triage nurse, which is like the nurse you see at the beginning of a trip to the emergency room who takes your blood pressure. I was a nurse on the first day. As it turned out, because of the snow and less people coming, we only saw 300 people over five days and we usually see about 1,200 people … It worked out well. It was so cold and people had to walk to get to it,” she said. “(The other days) I did evangelism … I wouldn’t say I’m an evangelist because I’m not. I witnessed the spreading of the word of God to the people of Georgia.”

Callaway said she has done evangelism before, but never on a medical trip, and it became a “powerful” experience.

“It was awesome. It was very powerful,” she said. “That was something I never had the opportunity to do on any other medical trip.”

Callaway said she met many friends and carved relationships from the trip.

“I keep up with them through Facebook,” she said. “We speak broken forms of each other's language, but it’s the relationships.”

Callaway remembers when she tried to speak the country’s native language to residents while on the trip. She laughs when she tells it, because she remembers the residents laughing at her.

“I learned a few words in Georgian,” she said. “I learned ‘sit down, please,’ ‘thank you,’ ‘hello,’ ‘nice to meet you’ and ‘you’re welcome.’ They would crack up laughing whenever I'd say something.”

Like she said, it is all about the relationships and memories, and handing out a little bit of love to residents on the other side of the globe that could use a hug or two.

“They needed someone to care about them,” she said, noting she has been to Africa and the Dominican Republic on service trips. “The main goal is we’re doing it with the love of Jesus in mind.”