Letters in Motion: Hope in an Envelope

Reaching out to local communities is one thing, but putting local faces on a global scale for humanitarian work is an endeavor all its own. One UTM student is making this mission possible.

Junior psychology major John Sellers, with the help of the University of Tennessee at Martin, is launching a humanitarian program known as Letters in Motion. The program sends letters of hope to orphans in Nepal and builds orphanages there with the help of three missionary families. The will then help rescue at-risk children between the ages of three and eight before they are thrust into poverty or subject to human trafficking.

The program is scheduled to begin in June 2015. Funding the trip will require raising $3,000 per student along with $15,000 for technical equipment. Sellers has already raised $10,000, and five of his missionaries have also raised a significant amount thus far on an individual basis.

Sellers and his team will release two promotional videos to raise awareness for the foreign aid. One video will be of the students who write the letters and will showcase the entire sequence of mailing a single letter, then handing it to a child in Nepal. The second video is still in the concept stage, although it will also promote the project.

Multiple student organizations have agreed to support the project. For example, both the UTM Baptist Christian Ministry and the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity will be helping to raise awareness.

Letters in Motion will also be putting together three film presentations for each missionary family to help those families raise money for the project. One of the missionary families, the Robideaus, moved to Nepal in 2011. Husband and father Rob Robideau wrote and published six books, including At Home Anywhere—Six Proven Expat Secrets for Making Yourself At Home in Any Foreign Country. The family provides Bible studies for the youth in their area. Robideau is also working on a small gospel radio broadcast. Another missionary family will be providing a small printing press in which Letters in Motion will be working.

Sellers says that Letters in Motion is a family project that has been going on for a significant amount of time.

“The name Letters in Motion is new, but the work behind it has been going on for over 20 years,” said Sellers.

In 1991, Sellers’ uncle and aunt, Joe and Tanna Collins, moved to Boudha, Nepal, and worked as missionaries. They started one children’s home there. In 1992, Tanna was diagnosed with typhoid fever. She and the family of five then traveled to Thailand for better medical care. But the family would never make it home. On June 31, 1992, the Thai Airways plane they were on crashed, killing all 113 on board. The project was then taken over by Sellers’ grandparents and later by his father, Chad Sellers.

Sellers recalls living out of a suitcase through his teenage years, as his father was always traveling to preach and raise money for missionary trips to Nepal. On the Letters in Motion website, Sellers explains that the family’s passion has always been serving the Lord. His family traveled to over 30 states and reached out to some 250 churches. For the past one and a half years, Sellers’ father has been a visiting professor at Bishwa Bhasa International School of Languages in Kathmandu, Nepal, and his mother, Sandy, has been teaching English in the children’s home ministry.

Sellers said that he wants to help keep the legacy going. His plan is to add another country to the list of mission trips each year, beginning with Portugal next year. He hopes to inspire involvement from both Bethel College and Union University.

His family started this project’s legacy, but now Sellers wants to reach out to UTM students to help with the aid. He actually turned down a job offer in photography with a $40,000 salary to instead remain a student at UTM to help this program grow. Sellers is, in turn, combining his love of photography with his mission work. He says that he wants to capture the raw images of the desperately lost peoples of Nepal to make people understand the need for foreign aid.

“Nepal is where I found myself,” said Sellers. “It is where I fell in love with portrait photography and where I found my passion for helping the Nepali people. I saw true poverty. I saw kids that were abandoned and left only to beg just to eat. Nepal is where I have to be. It’s where my heart is.”

Letters in Motion is still looking for more students to travel as missionaries. Sellers wants to gather some of UTM’s finest to better the world for the Nepali people. “I want to inspire people to be the direct change in a global way,” Sellers said.

For more information on Letters in Motion, visit their website at www.golettersinmotion.com

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