“They’re So Happy”
| Through the eyes of North Americans . . . | Through the eyes of majority world Christians . . . |
|---|---|
| We who were born in America have to understand, we hit the lottery by growing up here.[80] | Why do they think we’re so poor? What makes them think we want what they have? |
Our family lived in Singapore for a while. After being there for a few weeks, Linda and I decided it was time for our girls to encounter a little broader experience of Asia. We wanted them to taste and see something other than Singapore’s slick, modernized streets lined with countless Starbucks and trendy shopping centers. So we crossed the Straits of Johor and entered the world of Malaysia. Within our first few minutes in the developing world of Malaysia, we experienced a much rawer, edgier atmosphere. We were solicited for money and walked by a leper. We noticed that less attention seemed to be given to covering up the good and the bad of life and society. I was totally energized. I love robust, authentic places like Johor. And I was excited about the chance for our family to get a taste of a place that much more closely resembles where much of the world lives than either Singapore or Midwest America.
Prior to our trip to Malaysia, we’d told our girls to each pick out a toy they could give to a child in Malaysia. We described for them the poverty of many of the children in places like Malaysia. Emily, my older daughter, picked out a stuffed frog, and Grace chose some candy to give away. Clearly, these weren’t very “sacrificial gifts,” but we were going to start small with instilling in them a spirit of generosity. The girls were excited to embark on a “short-term mission” of their own.
Not too long into our day trip, it started to rain. We were stranded under a covered walkway for a while. I looked around me and saw a Malay man with his daughter. They were passing time sitting in the dirt, and they looked like prime targets for our “planned generosity.” I leaned over to Emily and said, “See that little girl over there. I bet she would love the frog you brought. Let’s go take it to her.” Wide-eyed, Emily and I walked over to the little girl, tried to communicate nonverbally a bit, and handed her the stuffed frog. The little girl hugged it and held it close to her. After a few minutes of smiling back and forth, we didn’t know what else to do so we smiled and started to walk away. As we started to leave, the dad ordered his daughter to return the frog. We motioned that we didn’t want it back, but he insisted. He began to raise his voice and grabbed the frog and handed it to me. I tried once more to express that we wanted her to have it, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
I walked away a little frustrated that my daughter’s first experience with giving to the developing world wasn’t going quite the way I had hoped. We eventually found some kids who took our girls’ gifts, but it wasn’t nearly as easy to give our stuff away as we’d thought it would be. As I began to talk with Linda about it, we thought back to our home in the Chicago area. Though we had a very nice house, our home was one of the more modest ones in our neighborhood. Linda asked me, “So how would you feel if one of the parents in the million-dollar homes near us suddenly walked up to our girls and started handing them gifts?” All of a sudden I began to see this in a new light. If some rich person started giving my girls unsolicited gifts in my presence, I’d think, I’m quite capable of caring for them myself, thank you!
The last thing I want to imply is that we should keep our things to ourselves so as not to insult people by our generosity. However, dealing with people who live with a very different level of financial resources is complex. Generosity brings with it subtle, important issues related to power. We need to widen our perspective to think about how to respond to the poverty we often encounter when we travel to new cultural contexts. We want to explore the “power of generosity” through three questions: Who’s “poor”? Who decides what the needs are? and To give or not to give?
Who’s “Poor”?
One time I watched a Diane Sawyer interview with Brad Pitt. I was interested to hear how he would talk about his involvement in the One campaign (www.one.org), a global initiative to reduce poverty. The mantras of the One campaign are as follows: “One billion people live on less than one dollar a day. One by one, we can help them help themselves.” I’m glad to join a collective voice that calls each of us to consider what we can do to respond to poverty. The goals are ambitious—to cut global poverty in half by 2015 and to rid the world of extreme poverty by 2025.
Regardless of how you feel about the government getting involved in reducing global poverty, Pitt’s participation is inspiring. He told Sawyer, “I can’t get out of the press. These [Africans] can’t get in the press. So let’s redirect the attention a little bit. It drives me mental seeing what I’ve seen and knowing that it doesn’t show up in our news every day. I mean, literally thousands of people died today!”
Amid his good intentions, however, he kept saying, “Listen, we who were born in America have to understand, we hit the lottery by growing up here, by being born here.”[81] Pitt commiserates with poor Africans who didn’t get to be born in the land of the red, white, and blue. I don’t want to undermine someone from Hollywood speaking to a good cause. Thank God for that! Frankly, the church could take some cues from people like Pitt who are casting a vision for something so noble. Pitt’s lottery-winning sentiment, however, is one of the troubling comments I hear from short-termers as they return from the developing world. We come home talking about how blessed we are to live in North America. There are huge privileges that come with being born in certain parts of the world. However, are we implying that those not born in North America aren’t blessed? We must resist thinking that everyone longs to live here. There are privileges that come with being African and Chinese and Latin. There are blessings inherent to people living in places all over the world. We need to realize that not everyone in the world longingly wishes they had been born as a North American.
Not all Africans are starving and waiting for heroic Westerners to come and save them. People in places like Ethiopia, Ghana, and Uganda are grateful for the money raised through efforts such as the One campaign but hate the idea that the world still sees Africa as a place “where nothing ever grows, no rain nor rivers flow,” as sung in Bob Geldof’s twenty-year-old hit, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” The message of Ethiopia as a starving, helpless country has so permeated people’s thinking that Ethiopian tourist agencies often field inquiries from travelers who wonder if there will be any food available for them to eat when they arrive in Addis Ababa.
While the poverty, illiteracy, and disease throughout Africa are devastating, Africa is also a place where many people are not starving. Democracy has begun to take hold in many of its nations, and Africans currently grapple with answers to their own problems. More than 90 percent of Africans surveyed by a BBC poll said they are proud to be African.[82] They don’t feel like they lost the lottery!
Many short-term missions endeavors force us to face the issue of poverty head-on. My friend Ashish came from northern India to visit me in Chicago a few years ago. We were eating at Gino’s Pizzeria one day and ran into a youth pastor I knew, along with his youth group. They had just returned from Central America and were spending a day in Chicago to debrief their trip. Ashish asked the group, “So what did you learn from your trip?” Student after student obsessed about the poverty of “those poor people.”
After the youth group left, Ashish said to me, “Why do they think we’re so poor? What makes them think we want what they have?” Sipping my third refill, I retorted, “Ashish. Give me a break! This is a good thing. Financially speaking you are poor compared to any of those kids. It’s so hard to get their minds off their consumerist passions. I’m really grateful to hear they experienced some dissonance when they saw the poverty.”
Ashish rebutted, “Well, that’s nice and all, but I’m so sick of sympathetic Westerners who think we need more stuff. Why would that have anything to do with our happiness? Please don’t import the idol of consumerism into India.” He went on to tell me about the North American group who was just with him in Delhi. “They were really concerned about the bicycle I used to get back and forth to church,” he said. “They found out how ‘inexpensively’ they could purchase me a car, and without even asking me, they informed me they had all chipped in to get me a little car! The last thing I wanted was a car. I had to find a tactful way of telling them that if they really wanted to invest in something, I had several members in my church who could use those same dollars to help set up a microenterprise development. But I think I kind of ‘rained on their parade’ as you say. They thought I was just being super-sacrificial.”
Granted, some Indians would have jumped at the chance to receive a car from a well-intentioned short-term missions team, and some Africans wish they had been born in North America. And the last thing I want to do is diminish the importance of giving sacrificially and generously. We need to do that. But as with all the other realities we’ve been encountering on this journey together, meeting the needs of others requires us to question our assumptions before acting. We need to serve with eyes wide open and understand that there are ways we’re poor and ways we’re rich. The same is true in the majority world.
In our attempts to be generous, we presume others want what we have to give them. Worse yet, sometimes we’re the first ones to tell the majority world that they’re poor. One Ugandan church leader said it this way: “We did not know we were poor until someone from the outside told us.”[83]
Who Decides What the Needs Are?
One of the things that drove me to write this book was my concern that short-term missions participants might continue to make the same mistakes made by mission workers in the past. The assumption that we know what is most needed by people in another place is the assumption that allowed Rome, England, and Spain to say their colonialist domination was not primarily self-centered. Our financial wealth, and all the amenities that accompany it, easily inclines us to think we know what other people need.
I often participate in conferences where short-term missions agencies have exhibits. When I ask an organization’s representative how the majority church is engaged in what they’re doing overseas, I often hear, “Oh yes, we’re very committed to working with the national churches there. We ask them if they want to be involved.” Did you catch that? We ask them if they want to be involved. Maybe we should start by asking if we should be involved at all, and if so, how? What might it look like if on-the-ground ministry leaders helped us open our eyes to the real needs? Not only is it colonialist to invite locals’ input on the back end of planning, but we often end up doing irrelevant and costly work. Local ownership means more than inviting participation or asking for input. It means letting the local churches actually direct and shape what we do in our cross-cultural efforts; they ask us if we want to be involved rather than vice versa.
Building projects are one of the most popular kinds of short-term missions endeavors—building churches, rebuilding homes after a natural disaster, building ministry centers, and so on. I’ve done my share of mixing cement, painting walls, and nailing in studs. Believe me, if you knew my total ineptness at any kind of home-improvement project, you’d get a good laugh thinking about me trying to put a roof on a church building in South America.
How do the locals feel about our building pursuits on “their” behalf? As with most of these issues, the reviews are mixed. Many express gratitude at seeing fair-skinned kids give up two weeks of vacation to sweat it out as they mix cement all day long a world away from their backyard swimming pools. We’ve all watched the video testimonials about how life is completely different now because of the homes built, the hospital maintenance that took place, and the brand-new roof on the church.
Others struggle with the thought of how many locals could be employed by investing the money spent on a typical short-term building project. Local ministries see short-term groups raise money for a one-week trip that exceeds a majority world church’s annual budget. Jo Ann Van Engen, a missionary in Honduras, contends, “Short-term mission groups almost always do work that could be done (and usually done better) by people of the country they visit. The spring-break group spent their time and money painting and cleaning the orphanage in Honduras. That money could have paid two Honduran painters who desperately needed the work, with enough left over to hire four new teachers, build a new dormitory, and provide each child with new clothes.”[84]
One Honduran bricklayer had this to say about his experience working with a building team: “I found out soon enough that I was in the way. The group wanted to do things their way and made me feel like I didn’t know what I was doing. I only helped the first day.”[85]
A ministry leader in Zimbabwe asks us to remember that Africans also know how to build buildings. In talking about one of the groups that visited his community, he said, “It isn’t that they didn’t work hard. . . . But they must remember that we built buildings before they came, and we will build buildings after they leave. Unfortunately, while they were here, they thought they were the only ones who knew how to build buildings.”[86]
Is it wrong to build buildings? Some think so, but I think there can be a place for it. But we must plan these efforts with an understanding about the true needs, how we can help meet those needs, and how to use an approach that is helpful for the long haul. We do have something to offer, but let’s discover what that is through dialogue with the majority world church.
A group from my church just returned from a couple weeks in Rwanda. Within their first hour in Rwanda, the local team said, “Ninety percent of your job is done. You’re here. Your presence speaks volumes.” One of the team members told me she thought, “Well, I don’t think so. That’s gracious of you, but we’re here to work hard.” The longer she was there, however, the more she began to see that the tasks they had gone to do were not what was needed most. Their presence and the chance for relationships seemed to be more pressing needs for the Rwandan church than any menial tasks that were planned. Do the menial tasks; they teach us about serving, and we get to serve alongside our brothers and sisters. Be sure to remember, however, that painting a room for our brothers and sisters or putting in windows isn’t really what it’s about. It’s about meeting a deeper need in us and in them.
These issues aren’t exclusive to short-term missions work done overseas. I recently talked with an African-American pastor from Cincinnati who said he gets an average of ten phone calls a day at Christmastime from local pastors who want to donate clothes and toys. As much as he appreciates the goodwill, he says, “No thanks. What we really need are people willing to build relationships with many of our single moms. We need tutors for kids. We need people who can invite folks over for dinner and vice versa.” The pastor went on to tell me, “After hundreds of conversations like that over the last five years, only one church has taken me up on my counteroffer.”
Shane Claiborne of the Simple Way in Philadelphia thinks most North American Christians do care about the poor. He says, “I believe the great tragedy of the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor, but that they do not know the poor.”[87] He believes we resort to charitable giving as a way to ease our consciences rather than really entering into mutually enriching relationships with people who are financially poor.
To Give or Not to Give?
If we think of people as “poor,” we demean them. If we ignore the fact that two billion people live on less than two dollars a day, we’re selfish consumers. Is there any way out of this?
This is precisely the dilemma Boone, from Richard Dooling’s White Man’s Grave, was feeling as he continued to experience life as an American in the world of Sierra Leone. Boone refused to be the rich North American who had African servants working for him while he looked for his Peace Corps friend Michael. Boone turned down six kids who wanted to be his servants. His African host says, “You’re a millionaire. Share the wealth. For 25 cents, someone will clean your room. For a dime, someone will walk 2 miles for you to get a bucket of water for you to bathe in. Nobody here is going to admire you for not hiring servants. You’ll just be thought of as unbelievably stingy.”[88]
This example brings up the same kind of dissonance I feel when I’m told I shouldn’t give money to homeless people because they’ll just spend it on more alcohol. But the alternative, avoiding eye contact and ignoring a person in need, doesn’t sit right. There is a clear ethical responsibility that comes with encountering poverty.[89]
Terence Linhart talks about how encountering poverty challenged the high school students from Indiana who traveled to Ecuador. Eighteen-year-old Amy looked over the town from her hotel and said, “It’s just amazing, the poverty. Like, it breaks my heart, but it makes me feel so spoiled, and like I’m such an evil person.”[90] Another student said, “Living in America is a blessing and a curse at the same time. There’s a blessing because you have all this stuff, but all the stuff is a curse, you know?”[91]
Adults report the same kind of dilemma when returning from short-term missions trips. Typical comments made by adult participants include: “We’re so blessed. I realize it when I see how little they have.” “I’m so encouraged by how much they do with so little.” “I have it so good and I never want to take it for granted after seeing the joy in these people’s faces even though they have so little.” My fear is that this kind of observation makes it too easy to jump on a plane in Ecuador or Ethiopia and go home convinced that “those people are so happy just the way they are!”
On the other hand, many people living in poverty possess amazing wealth in other areas. Rather than demeaning them as tragic objects to be rescued, we need to see them as our equals so we can walk with them and learn from them, each benefiting from one another’s “wealth” and sacrifice.[92]
Concluding Thoughts
The realities that come with money cause me a great deal of personal dissonance. Even as I write, I’m doing so from the cozy Starbucks a few blocks from my home. I’m well aware of the many whose weekly wage is equal to the cost of the latte I’m sipping. That’s problematic, but how might our sympathy for fellow brothers and sisters in Christ in majority world places lead us to treat them in demeaning ways? Our wealth creates all kinds of power issues, and as much as we want to talk about collaborative relationships between churches in different cultures, a majority world church leader who feels safe to be really honest with you may well confess that he realizes the need to keep the “partnering” church in the West happy so that funds keep flowing.
On the other hand, we must not ease our consciences by thinking they’re happy enough without our money. Maybe I need to sip a few less lattes every week and invest those same dollars to help free a couple young girls in Bangkok from prostitution. What if we committed to spend at least as much money supporting the projects we visit on our short-term trips as we do on getting us there? What if our building projects included hiring local labor and only buying local materials?
The road forward requires us to look at some of these tensions. As we look honestly at the complexity of the issues related to money, our perspective begins to widen, which allows us to serve more effectively. All this perspective widening will translate into action. Changed perspective equals changed practice. We’ll look at that more in part 3, but first we need to look at one more reality in North American short-term missions. This one overrides all the others.