VALDOSTA — Brett and Alicia White each went to Louisiana to help in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He from Valdosta. She from Hurricane, W.Va. They didn’t expect to find love but they did in discovering one another amidst the devastation.

Once married, they made missionary work their lives until recently. Last fall, they returned to his South Georgia home with their two young daughters. The Whites had spent five years working with churches in the Ukraine.

It takes a certain compassion to help others in a faraway land. It takes a certain courage to risk everything traveling into unknown circumstances. But, as the Whites have found, sometimes through that sacrifice, by that leap of faith, a person can gain many blessings.

Born in Tennessee, Brett White grew up one of three children of a preacher. The son of Charles and Yvonne White, the family moved in 1987 to Valdosta. A ninth-grader then, Brett attended Valdosta High School and Georgia Christian School, graduating in 1990.

As a youngster, Brett walked away with a balanced perspective on his father being a minister.

“You can see people be really ugly and non-Christian right there in the church,” Brett says, but he also witnessed the blessings of the church and how it inspired the best in people.

He witnessed his father’s domestic missionary work, raising money for various projects and temporary mission trips.

As far as Brett’s professional ambitions, he planned on becoming a veterinarian. At school, veterinary medicine did not work for him. He studied the Bible for a year. Summers, he worked with a youth ministry. Though the non-denominational Church of Christ does not really require ordainment, Brett became ordained.

In 2005, Brett felt the need to travel west in response to Hurricane Katrina. Volunteering, he worked long days helping the people of Louisiana. Despite the labor, Brett couldn’t help but notice another volunteer.

However, the way he tells the story, Brett couldn’t help but notice other “volunteers.” He says one volunteer, a young woman from West Virginia, wore enough different clothes that he thought she was a different person with each wardrobe change. He thought, there sure are a lot of good-looking girls here.

Those “good-looking girls” were Alicia.

They spent long days working together. Given the intensity of the situation and the needs, Brett describes a day in post-Katrina New Orleans as being like a week. He and Alicia grew to know one another well.

They saw one another at their best and their worst. They saw how one another dealt with stressful situations, how they operated with a lack of sleep, how they looked in a non-stop emergency. No matter the situation, Brett and Alicia liked what they saw in each other.

Three months after meeting, they married in December 2005, in St. Tammany Parish.

While Katrina brought them together, it also introduced them to other missionaries and mission organizations. This would lead to the young couple traveling to the Ukraine.

Married, their work finished in New Orleans, the Whites received an offer to serve as missionaries in the Ukraine. They were uncertain.

Brett recalls the story of a 1990s Airport Church of Christ short-term mission to the region. Ukrainian people chomping for anything spiritual, people flooding to receive free Bibles. But they hungered for everything, spiritual and otherwise, Brett says. They flocked to eat at McDonald’s. They flooded strip clubs. “Anything they had not been exposed to, they hungered for it,” Brett says.

In 2006, the Whites agreed to visit the Ukraine before making a final decision. One might expect they fell for the region in that visit. They did not.

“We didn’t fall in love with it immediately,” Brett says. Alicia even prayed in hopes God would not send them there.

Returning to the States, something changed.

“We let it cook for a while before we decided to commit,” Brett says.

In August 2006, they traveled to the Ukraine. Even in committing, they still had choices.

The Ukraine can easily be described as being split into two basic regions. There is the western portion of the Ukraine, more independent unto itself, and the eastern portion which is predominantly Russian in language and culture.

The Whites established their first years in the eastern portion. They spent their final years in the west.

They were among the second wave of missionaries to visit the Ukraine in the post-Soviet era. The first missionary wave arrived in the 1990s, flooding the Ukraine, after the Soviet Union collapsed. The second wave ministered to established churches.

Brett says it was not the imperialistic mission style of the past but, rather, a partnership approach.

In the Ukraine, the Whites met people who never had a church experience. Generations had passed since the established church had thrived in this region. Still, even with decades of church absence, the people have a religious mindset. For example, Brett says, there is no separation between church and state in the Ukraine. Religion is part of the national identity.

For example, Brett explains, you ask the majority of Italy’s population about religion, they answer Catholic. Ask the same question in Ukraine, the answer is Orthodox.

As a Church of Christ missionary, the Whites had no problems handling this answer because Church of Christ members are less concerned about denomination than they are about “trying to simply be Christians,” Brett says. By that, he means, among other things, Christians need a personal experience with God, pray, be kind to other people, and walk in faith with other people.

In the Ukraine, the people related anything viewed as a vice as being a sign that the sinner was not truly a person of faith. A congregant smoking a cigarette serves as something akin to a reverse shibboleth — a sign that the congregant was not truly a Christian.

This may sound harsh, but some of these Christians lived in harsh times. In the Soviet era, the open demonstration of a vice often served as a sign that the sinner was not a Christian but rather a mole infiltrating the church to share information with the state. Ukrainian Christians lead strict lives in order to identify one another as Christians.

At about the time when the Whites considered their mission complete in Russian-influenced eastern Ukraine, they received the call for mission work in the western region. Instead of coming home, they moved to the west.

There, the Whites learned of Stephen Epi Bilak, who founded the church in Ternopil.

Bilak came of age as an expatriate. “He was exiled as a boy to Germany, as slave labor,” Brett recounts. “He got a good family who treated him well, so he survived and was able to leave after the war. He couldn’t return to the Ukraine because of the (Soviet Premier Josef) Stalin regime would have labeled him a traitor. So he moved to Canada, schooled in America, returned to live his adult life in Switzerland where he broadcast gospel radio to Ukraine in his native tongue over the Iron Curtain. When the wall fell, he returned to unite with some of his family members and started the church that we were able to work with.”

Meanwhile, Brett and Alicia had two children during their five-year mission work in the Ukraine. Alicia returned both times to her native West Virginia so the girls would be born in the U.S. Still, Isabella, now 3 years old, and Allette, now 17 months, both spent their earliest years and months in the Ukraine.

In September 2011, the Whites returned home to the U.S., settling into life in his home of South Georgia. They continue looking for work here and have kept the faith that these needs will be answered.

“We don’t know what will happen next,” Brett says. “Our meeting one another, our mission work, they were put in our laps by God. ... So, we are waiting and we will know it when it comes.”

Some people may think this naive, Brett says, but experience has taught the Whites otherwise.