There and Back Again

Where do I start?

I've been back for a month now. Coming back was a lot harder than going. It was odd, because I wasn't euphorically happy every day of the trip or anything. For the first few days I couldn't wait to come home. When I finally did, it took a long time to get used to routine and normality again.

I won this trip, or a large part of it, in a contest at Missionsfest. It was something I never would have chosen to go on and never could have afforded on my own so it was pretty amazing how God worked everything out. I didn't even enter (though I would have if I had seen it); my dad put in my name and my brother's and we all thought nothing would come of it. Well.

Skip to the interesting part.

There were seven people in our team—three adults, four teenagers—and I can't imagine what it would have been like if we had a group of 10-20 kids like most short-term mission trips seem to. We went with a organisation that sponsors children and is building a school/children's home.

So far they have the land cleared and after we left they were finally able to start drilling their well. We helped make bricks—out of clay and straw, you let them dry in the sun and then fire them in a kiln—and also gave out soup mixes and visited the some of the kids that they’re sponsoring. The children’s home is only for the most extreme cases, otherwise they want to keep the kids with their families as much as possible—even if one parent is dead or they’re living with an aunt or grandmother—because it’s usually better for the child and better for the community to grow up in that environment, no matter how wonderful the orphanage is.

We also spent a lot of time with the local kids, and did some children’s programs and that sort of thing. The people there are amazingly friendly. It’s part of the culture of hospitality—it’s an enormous honour to have guests. Especially white people. Shouts of “mzungu!” follow you everywhere you go, kids wave at you when they see you on the street. At the churches we visited everyone said, “You’re only staying three weeks? Why are you only staying three weeks? We must find you good African husbands, and then you can stay here, and learn Swahili, and become true African women!”

I was uncomfortable with it at first because (subconsciously) you wonder how it can be genuine. We looked like tourists. We WERE tourists, more or less. After a few days I stopped being uptight and just enjoyed the experience, because what can you do about it. :P

Kenyan kids smile on demand (i.e. when you smile at them), unlike Canadian ones. They also LOVE having their pictures taken.

There's colour everywhere. Red roads, blue sky (not quasi-blue with a permanent layer of cloud). A lot of the shops and houses are painted in not-quite-neon. You see school uniforms everywhere—some drab like ours, some bright pink or purple.

We visited a couple different schools. At one of them, one of the girls on our team, K., started talking with those girls through the window. One of them said, "You must make sure I can come to Canada! You will bring me to Canada, right?"
"I'm sorry," said K., "I can't."
"Then you can give me money! Do you have any money?"
"No," said K.
"But you will give me something!" said the girl. "What do you have?"
"Nothing, sorry," said K.
The girl looked at C. (the only guy in our group). "Then give me the boy!"

I’d like to go back but I’d like even more to go somewhere else, somewhere that doesn’t have so much effort already being poured into it. It would be silly to pretend that we changed the world in three weeks, that we made a huge lasting impact for God’s kingdom. We didn’t. Most short term mission trips probably don’t—what can you accomplish in a couple weeks that will last? Not much.

But if the main point is to get people interested in what's going on over there and show them what life is like outside of our rich, North American bubble, then it definitely worked. I wasn't the only one who became interested in the third world and in doing more.

Because I come from a super-missions-family (my parents were missionaries in China for years and unreached peoples are my dad's passion) it's something I've grown up hearing about. We have missionaries over all the time. We do street outreaches for teenagers and minorities. My parents have missionary friends all over the world and we subscribe to all the magazines and newsletters.

None of that was quite the same as getting shoved out of my small comfort zone and seeing it for myself. It wasn't a momentous first step. But still a step.