Yesterday I posted about a mission trip I took to Haiti back in the 1980s. A youth center our denomination supported had a fire that damaged the second floor. We were going to help remove the walls and begin the process of building new ones. When we arrived most of the walls had already been removed and a group of Haitian workers were in the process of tearing down the last one.
One of the things I appreciate about our denomination is its approach to doing missions. We don't do things "for" people in need; we work "with" these people to best serve them. We were not going to do this project for the people who used the youth center, we were going to work with them to begin the process of rebuilding the facility.
While I agree with this approach, it's not easy for a Type-A personality like myself to work at the pace of other people. I would have preferred to have attacked this project knowing that we were only going to be there one week, and others in our group felt the same way. But, this is a recipe for doing more harm than good. Working with the local laborers we worked at a much slower pace, but we also built relationships with these workers that helped them feel like they had an important part in this project. For the long term best outcome, this is much more important for Kingdom building than quickly finishing a building project.
It so happens I'm currently reading When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert. They report that in 2016 there were 2.2 million short term mission projects costing $1.6 billion. One would think that with this many mission projects that much good was accomplished, and it was, but there was also a lot of damage done in some cases. Sometimes when Americans do mission work the people being served are made to feel inferior and disrespected.
This is exactly what we did not want to have happen with our Haitian co-workers and their foreman. We wanted them to feel respected and appreciated for what they were doing which is why we worked at their pace, using their techniques and including them in everything we were doing. After work one day we accompanied the foreman to his home to see where he lived and enjoyed a cold Pepsi with him and his wife.
One day when we all felt like a mid-morning snack was needed, the missionary with whom we were working went to a street seller of oranges near where we were working to get each of us an orange. That may have been the biggest sale she had that day. Respecting and working within the culture has a long-term impact that can far exceed what we are trying to accomplish.
While working on the building one day I noticed a building that was obviously not completed and had been in that state for a long period of time. I asked our missionary if he knew what that was supposed to be. He explained that it was a house that was being built by a well-known American televangelist as a mission project in Haiti. He said similar buildings are found throughout the island that are started by various ministries and never completed. He explained that they raise money to do such projects, but when the money runs out, they find another "hot spot" that needs help and begin to raise new money for it. I can't help but wonder how that influences the people's thoughts about Christianity.
As churches minister to their own communities and its needs, these are important things to remember. Sometimes, in an effort to help we can actually do harm to people. It's easy to throw money at a problem; it's much more difficult to carefully think through how best to address the problem. While it might feel good to attack a problem and "fix" it, it might be better to take a long-term approach and address it in a way that honors the ones being helped and God.
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