At age 17, Britnie Turner planned to be a missionary. She had enrolled in survival classes for “extremely hard-core” missionary work in the depths of Africa.
In the midst of her first mission trip, she met a little girl who was disabled because of past sexual abuse.
Turner says, “I got on my knees and said, ‘God, I don’t want to live in a world where this is socially acceptable.’ And He said, ‘I’m going to take you out of the mission field, and I’m going to put you in business.'”
After three years of living in her car and learning how to flip houses, Turner bought her first house. Over time, she learned how to completely revitalize poorly resourced city neighborhoods. From there she built a company that soon was listed by Forbes as the sixth-fastest-growing woman-owned company in the world. She continued to work, and built seven businesses in the process, but her interest in revitalizing neighborhoods grew into wanting to revitalize countries.
As Turner’s vision began to expand, God told her to buy an island in the British Virgin Islands. She bought it, and she began fixing it up, not understanding why God wanted her to have an island in paradise. Soon after she bought it, though, Hurricanes Irma and Maria destroyed the British Virgin Islands. She immediately volunteered as a first responder hoping to help recover some of her friends’ bodies.
As Turner helped in the effort, she tried to figure out how to help countries “recover at an accelerated rate” so they wouldn’t fall into desperation-based issues like human trafficking. She gives an example: “When someone’s house blows away, a lot of times people will let the family stay with them, but they get their daughter in exchange.”
As a result of what she observed as a first responder, Turner noticed that elite military veterans typically are the most effective in helping organize and execute disaster relief. After those hurricanes, she and her now husband, a former Army Green Beret, run Aerial Recovery, a nonprofit that employs “the most qualified, trained, and elite military Veterans” and deploys them “as Humanitarian operators” to man-made and natural disasters all over the world.
When Aerial Recovery deployed a team of 80 into Ukraine to find 10,000 of the orphans who have gone missing, Turner accompanied her team.
“I’m not normally one that says the news is accurate, I’ll tell you that,” says Turner. “But I will tell you in Ukraine, it’s pretty accurate.”
In an interview, Lance Wallnau asked Turner just how accurate it is. She responded, “The news that’s accurate is the horrors that are happening to the people — the torture, the children getting raped. It’s Russian soldiers (doing the raping). It’s not a normal war. This is a war of terrorism, trying to scare people into submission.”
Turner says that her team found a mass grave that included the bodies of children and youth with their hands tied behind their backs and their ears cut off.
She refers to what her husband, a former Army Green Beret, said about it: “War gives guys like me PTSD. I’ve trained for this, and I’ve been in the Army for 20 years, and I’m messed up from it. What is this doing to children?”
Turner described the scene in Ukraine as “absolutely horrific.”
“When you meet these families that have experienced it or watched people get tortured … the orphans watch their caretakers get brutally murdered right in front of them,” Turner says.
Although Turner believes Ukraine needs help, she makes it clear that it’s not about Ukraine or Russia.
“Our purpose is to save lives, eliminate confusion, and accelerate recovery,” says Turner. “Our goal is to protect the innocent. If Ukraine was attacking Russia, we would be in Russia helping safeguard innocent people.”
You can visit Turner’s ministry here at aerialrecovery.com. {eoa}
Rob Vischer is a freelance writer for Charisma Media.
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