Teresa Tavera Thomas will not be having turkey this year.

Nor will the Westwood Rotary Club member and missionary find a craving to sit in front of a warm hearth with a hot cup of cider.

   Instead, she'll be amidst the sweltering 90-degree temperatures of Ehime Mbano, a local government area in the heart of Nigeria, where she heads today on a six-month trip to help strengthen health care and purify water sources in the village.

   "My ultimate goal is to improve the medical care, to improve some of the hospitals in the villages, (and) to set up free health care clinics to the poor in the villages, which is most of the people," Thomas said last week as she prepared for the trip. "They can't even go to a hospital, let alone a clinic, so they're dying in villages."

   While in Nigeria, Thomas will also be lending a hand in a project devised by the Westwood and Dedham Rotary clubs to install new solar-powered water wells in the area. That project will be carried out in a village known as Umunakanu Owerre.

   "Many people put in generator wells," Thomas said. "And what happened when I went into the villages, the generators weren't operating because people can't afford to maintain them. That's why we're doing this first project. Westwood Rotary has been my backbone. We have been working on this project a long time."

   The village is currently under a dry season, Thomas said, so water is scarcer than the rest of the year. When it does rain, villagers will do what they can to take advantage.

"Sometimes they'll collect (water) that way, or put jugs out or barrels," Thomas said. "There's also something that's sold in the villages called Pure Water. It's not very expensive, but it's contaminated."

   The current drinking water is so unsanitary, that villagers are becoming gravely ill with parasites and diseases that can be treated with general medicines.

"They're dying of treatable diseases," said Thomas. "They're dying of undiagnosed and unrecognized things like high blood pressure, diabetes, skin infections, pneumonia from a cold. Just a simple antibiotic would prevent them from dying. Rickets are very big there. That's from lack of Vitamin D and poor nutrition, so then their bones become deformed."

Thomas, who also goes by the name of Ozioma of Igboland in Nigeria (the villagers she works with are referred to as Igbos), runs her own website, which was created by her 24-year-old son Greg, who will be visiting her in February.

   And while she's always had a yearning to help those in need, becoming a missionary was not exactly in Thomas's life plan. Her main focus, rather, was on being a hospice nurse, when she met a priest while moving from Illinois to Massachusetts.

   The priest, Father Paul Ogoke, has spoken at a church Thomas visited one day for morning mass, and it was his speech that sparked the idea of carrying out missionary work. The problem, she said, was she didn't know how to get started.

   Meanwhile, the mass fell on the anniversary of the death of Ogoke's father, who told Ogoke that someone would ask him to help in missionary work before he died. A year later, he couldn't say no when Thomas fulfilled the small prophecy.

   After some discussion, the two embarked on a trip to Nigeria in February 2007. The trip lasted two weeks, but Thomas realized she was far from finished with her work.

"After staying there two weeks, I wanted to stay longer," she said. "So (Ogoke) left and I was in the villages alone for three months, and then I came home and I couldn't get them (the villagers) out of my heart."

   As such, she has been traveling back and forth to Nigeria ever since, helping to bring medical aid and working harder to finding ways to bring clean water to villagers.

Thomas, though, is adamant to clarify that her deeds are not done to make others feel lacking in the area of giving.

"This is in no way to make them feel guilty," she said. "But if they can get any message of the people I live with, it's to be grateful to turn on a faucet, to get a flu shot at Walgreens. If there's an attitude of gratefulness, of what we have here, it'd be a gift to these people, I'm sure."

   But despite their ailments, Thomas said the villagers she sees day-to-day in the country are beyond grateful for what they do have, rather than fret about what they don't.

"You always see them smiling," she said. "I guess the most important message is that the Nigeria I've experienced, the people are loving, hospitable, and very faith-filled.

"Their God is the center of their life. They have joy because they depend on God, and they love God. We put God to the side, and fit Him in, but if they have one bowl of rice that night, and I'm walking through the villages, they will give me what they have."

   God is so prevalent in the lives of the villagers that many Igbo names have God in their meaning, such as Osinachi, which means "gift from God," Kambinachi, which means "living in God" and Chidi, or "there is God."

   "They live in the moment," she said. "And the sad thing is, many times people will say, 'That's because they have nothing else,' or, 'They don't know what they're missing.' And that's not true. They do know what they're missing. They know what the world can be like. They know what real electricity is. And the other thing is, I know Igbos out here (in the United States) who have things, and who still put God in the center of their life."

   Many of the villagers are farmers, and as such rely heavily on crops for food supply, which basically consist of maize, rice and lamb cassava.

And while food is scarce, villagers will consistently greet Thomas into their homes with Kola nut as part of a small prayer ceremony, during which they break the nut, feed her, and ask God to protect her.

"It's a Thanksgiving kind of thing," she said.

Thomas heads to Nigeria today, and in her journey takes with her the memory of an anonymous quote she came to in her travels:

Past the seeker as he prayed came the crippled and the beggar and the beaten.  And seeing them... he cried, "Great God, how is it that a loving creator can see such things and yet do nothing about them?"  God said, "I did do something.  I made you."

For more information on Thomas's work, and to donate to her cause, visit her website at www.ozioma.org.