Dangerous Territory

by Amy Peterson

  So I took the small steps that were the only things I knew to do to practice staying put. I named my kitten Éponine, after a tragic Victor Hugo character who lived on her own, and I figured out how to find food for her. I met the Thai exchange students who lived on the floor beneath me. I had a regular photocopy shop, where the owners made fun of me for using the wrong personal pronouns to address them, and a bakery I visited every day for loaves of French bread. I left my apartment door open so students would know they could come visit.

  For the time being, I tried to remind myself that I wasn’t there to save the world or to indulge my independent spirit. I temporarily shelved any grand ideas about fixing structural injustices and instead practiced the small, daily, rooted tasks that are, after all, also a part of doing justice and loving mercy, those simple things the monks also practiced. I made it my ambition to lead a quiet life, and to lead that quiet life where I was, while trying to learn from the people around me. I aimed to become a student of their language and their culture, to find out what love looked like to them.

  I was no longer a backpacker. I wasn’t an expat—at least, I was trying not to be. Instead, I was beginning to figure out what it means to be a neighbor.

  Interlude

  A Brief History of Short-term Missions

  Only fifty years ago, my stint teaching in Southeast Asia would have been considered a “short-term mission” trip. It’s worth pausing here, with my perspective on my life overseas beginning to shift, to consider the genesis and development of the short-term mission.

  For much of Christian history, a call to international missions had been considered lifelong; some early missionaries shipped their necessities in a coffin, assuming they wouldn’t come home except to be buried. But as travel technologies improved, home furloughs became possible, then standard. Shorter terms of service became realistic options. And then very short trips—even ten to fourteen days—became common for laypeople and youth.

  Short-term mission trips as we know them today began in the 1960s. The success of projects like the Peace Corps, paired with the growth of mass commercial air travel, inspired Christian organizations to experiment. Recruiting primarily college students and single twenty-somethings, organizations like YWAM (Youth With A Mission) and OM (Operation Mobilization) created cross-cultural experiences that lasted from a month to a year or two. A narrative grew up about these trips: they were ways for American young people to gain spiritual insight and grow personally while serving “the least of these.” Individual churches adopted the trend and set up their own trips, too.

  But established missionary boards and agencies were slower to adopt short-term missions, and when they did, the narrative was different: it was less about spiritual formation for the young people and more about helping established missionaries—even recruiting new, long-term missionaries. The boards didn’t view short-termers as missionaries, but as potential missionaries. The Southern Baptist “Journeyman” program, founded in 1965, for example, featured a two-year term with the goal of exposing young people “to missionary life while serving career goals of established missionaries.” In the late sixties, Africa Inland Mission had short-term options of one to two years available, but promotional materials encouraged missionaries to always have long-term service as their goal.

  It was not until the 1970s that high school students began to take part in short-term mission experiences. Summer youth trips gained widespread acceptance in the 1980s, and by the 1990s, they had exploded in popularity. The established missionary community, faced with the ubiquity of short-term trips, was forced to concede: finally, they too began calling them “missions trips,” and referring to people who made one- or two-year commitments overseas as “missionaries.”

  So you might say that in the brief history of short-term mission trips, there have been two competing narratives to justify their existence: the established missionary community wanted the story to be about recruiting potential missionaries and aiding established missionaries, but local churches and new organizations wanted the story to be about the spiritual growth of those who went, along with serving the poor (not traditionally a goal of missionary work, which had primarily been about evangelism, Scripture translation, and church planting). This second narrative, for the most part, won out in the American evangelical community.

  And this is why when people come back from a short-term trip, you’ll hear them say things like, “They [the poor] taught me so much more than I taught them,” or “They gave me so much more than I gave them.” This is the narrative their preparation has primed them to use. They had been told that they were going to serve the poor and experience spiritual growth; they’re simply saying that their spiritual growth seems more valuable than their service was.

  And undoubtedly, in a lot of cases, that’s true! Especially if the service they’ve gone to provide was a project their church dreamed up, rather than something the people they served had asked for.

  For example, suppose a church knows of a school in a Latin American country that needs a new building. They send a team of high schoolers to do the work, a common enough type of summer trip experience. But suppose that while these students—inexperienced in the art of building, but happy to serve—are working on the construction, a man from the community walks by. He’s bigger and stronger than the kids are. He’s unemployed. When he looks at them, he sees teenagers who have enough extra money to fly to his country, doing a job for free that he would have loved to have been paid even a small wage to do. Those wages would have gone to feed his family, or to enable him to buy the uniforms his children must have to attend that very school.

  This building team has helped the community, yes, but probably not in the best way. They’ve flown in like little gods, fixed a problem, and flown out again, leaving community members feeling even more helpless than before. Those teens wore their matching T-shirts emblazoned with “Bringing God to [insert country name here]!” as if God hasn’t been there all along. Maybe they have—unwittingly—used the poor for their own spiritual growth.

  Admittedly, this is just one example from a multitude of kinds of short-term trips. There are ways we’ve done them well, and ways we’ve done them not so well. But for now, let’s just talk about the language: Should we really call a trip like this, one we’ve just admitted does more for us than it does for the people we serve, a missions trip?

  What if, instead, we called them “vision trips” or “learning trips”? A simple renaming might change the whole way we plan, prepare for, and experience such trips.

  Imagine someone asking for financial support for a “vision trip.” Instead of saying, “Please give me money so that I can take the gospel to a dark place / build a house for the homeless / run a summer camp program for kids in Haiti / assist in a temporary medical clinic in Tegucigalpa,” a short-termer might say, “If you would like to invest in me, would you help me travel to a different culture so that I can expand my view of who God is and how he works by learning about him in a foreign land?”

  In preparing short-termers for their trips, we’d treat them like children about to visit an art museum. With training and education, children can progress from seeing everything but understanding almost nothing to really grasping what they do see. We can prepare them to learn from the museum guide. We can give them historical, social, and artistic language to use in describing their experience. Likewise, it would make sense for people preparing for a “vision trip” to learn about the history, language, economic structures, and ethnic groups of the community they’re about to visit so that when they arrive, they’ll be better able to understand what they see.

  When they went, short-termers would be ready to listen to locals, to learn from them. And they’d be able to integrate all the parts of their trip. Instead of dividing them into “ministry” and “tourism,” every aspect of the experience—even visits to famous sites, shopping in the markets, and attending a loc
al church—would be a part of a cohesive learning experience.

  Dr. David Zac Niringiye was assistant bishop of the Kampala diocese of the Anglican Church in Uganda. When asked if short-term mission trips could serve African Christians well, he suggested that short-term trips ought to be oriented around listening. What if, he said, instead of going with a “mission” in mind, Americans just brought greetings from one church to another, and opened up a conversation, a relationship?

  “Short-term mission” has been part of our lexicon for less than fifty years, and it’s the wrong name. Let’s change the term, and let that simple change lead us to a more reciprocal, authentic, relational model, one oriented around listening. Let’s be sure we in the West are aware of our cultural power, we use our social capital to help, and we learn about structural injustices instead of just witnessing poverty. Let’s make our trips about cross-cultural communication and relationship, and let’s line them up with the mission of God, which is long-term by definition: the restoration of relationships, the reconciliation of all things to himself.

  Of course, “vision trip” might not be the right name, either. My own trip to Southeast Asia would enlighten me, yes—but then it would leave me in the dark for a long time before my vision cleared again.

  5

  The Strictest American

  Let us adopt their costume, acquire their language, study to imitate their habits, and approximate to their diet as far as health and constitution will allow.

  Hudson Taylor, speaking of the Chinese

  One Saturday, a few weeks into the semester, Tina called us around eight in the morning. “Are you awake yet?” she asked Lisa, knowing her well enough by now to realize she’s struggling to get out of bed. I love the early morning, but Lisa’s a night owl. “When are we going to eat yogurt again?” Tina asked.

  Soon she was at the door. Lisa and I had scrambled into clothes, and we went just outside the campus walls, around the corner to our favorite café. It’s like a garage, a cement-floored room open to the street. We sat on child-sized blue plastic stools around a child-sized red plastic table, the customary seating at most street cafés in our city. Tina opened the small chest freezer just inside the café and brought us three glasses of plain yogurt. She picked metal spoons from the cutlery holder on our table, expertly rubbing them with thin paper napkins before handing them to us. “Enjoy,” she said, her playful eyes sparkling, and we did.

  Tina was a third year student, a class monitor and the daughter of the vice president of the university, which meant she was with us at least partly out of a sense of duty. We were teachers, and because of that it was her cultural responsibility to show us honor and respect. We were also foreigners, which meant it is her cultural responsibility to show us hospitality—and to keep an eye on us.

  Over cold, creamy bites of yogurt, we asked Tina questions. She preferred not to discuss her older, pock-faced, parent-approved boyfriend, but she admitted to us that her dream was to someday be headmistress of a university. The fact that we couldn’t think of any university with a female head in this country only made her more serious about the goal.

  Tina was just a year or two younger than I was, and I felt a natural affinity with her: she was smart, ambitious, wary of romance, and extremely competent. She teased me about my lack of skill with chopsticks. “You eat like a baby,” she said, smirking.

  “Actually, we haven’t been eating much at all,” interjected Lisa. “We need to go to the market.”

  “Yes, I will take you,” Tina said. She paid for our yogurt, and when we protested, told us, “I invited, so it’s my treat. Next time, though, you must invite me.” This is what made Tina one of our most valuable friends: in a country where much is silently implied and understood, she was willing to be blunt. She served as our cultural informant, somehow aware of exactly which things ignorant westerners needed to have explained, like this—whoever invites pays, and reciprocity is the foundation for relationship. There are no split tickets here.

  “What do you need to buy?” Tina asked as we headed toward the collection of blue tarp tents that made up our local street market. We’d learned enough language to buy some things. I could ask how much something cost, or say that I wanted six eggs. I could pick out potatoes, loaves of French bread, bananas, and packages of instant noodles.

  “We need help buying chicken,” I admitted. “Can you ask them to cut just the breast meat off the bone for us?” Once I explained what I meant by “chicken breast” (body language helped), Tina raised an eyebrow skeptically, but turned to a meat seller and began a long conversation. We couldn’t really follow it, except to see that the seller almost refused to sell the breasts alone, and that after she finally agreed, Tina had to argue for a price somewhat lower than a “charge foreigners twice as much” amount. “Do you want the bones, too?” Tina asked. When Lisa and I declined, it was clear both Tina and the seller thought we were wasteful.

  “There.” She handed us the bag. “If you come back to this seller, she’ll know to cut the breasts off for you,” she informed us. “What else?” It took a while to communicate to Tina that I wanted sugar and flour—not flowers, not rice flour, but wheat flour—but she took us to a stall with barrels full of white powders, and helped us buy a pound of each.

  We continued down the dirt path, lined on each side with wizened nut-brown women, sitting on their heels next to woven baskets full of green vegetables I’d never seen before or enormous tin bowls filled with water and shrimp and squid motored in from the coast, fifteen kilometers (a little over nine miles) away. A bony woman with stained lips expertly spit betel juice from the corner of her mouth, then grabbed my leg, asking a question I couldn’t understand. Tina answered her scornfully, then told me, “She asked if you were native.”

  “What?” I was confused. How could she even think I might be native? This country was a monoculture: everyone around me was slender, with straight, black hair and dark eyes. I’m blond and blue-eyed.

  “She thinks you’re too skinny to be American,” Tina explained. “In fact, she wouldn’t believe me. She argued that you must be Thai.” I asked Tina if she was teasing me again.

  “No,” Tina said. “We all wondered if you were really American when you first got here. Any Americans we’d seen before were big and tall, but you weren’t.” Finally convinced that I was, in fact, American, Tina told me that they had decided that I must be the strictest American. I didn’t see how that followed, so she explained: “You don’t dress like Britney Spears at all!”

  Finally we exited the market. Tina didn’t give a second glance to the legless beggar who sat at the entrance, though I always wondered who did help him, what my role ought to be, or if my home country had anything to do with his long-ago injury.

  There was little sense of individual responsibility to the poor or injured in this nation. Once, in the capital city, I witnessed a motorbike accident—two bikes went down, their drivers certainly injured. The streets were constantly clogged with motorbikes and only a few cars, and none of the drivers gave any thought to traffic rules. Nor did they care about the crash victims. No one stopped or rushed over to help. The other motorbike drivers simply swerved around them and kept on.

  After an accident in America, witnesses might feel compelled to stop—to assist the injured, to call 911, to report details to the police. In this country, though, no one feels that compunction unless they know the people in the accident—and not just know them, but consider them part of their in-group. In this collectivist culture, you owed nothing to strangers; but you owed everything to your in-group.

  I was confused by what this might mean for me. It was clear what it meant to my students. The importance of knowing their place within the group shaped their lives. Their parents made their decisions with them, sometimes even finding their dates for them. The family, not the individual, was the first and most important unit of survival. The students’ netw
orks of friends were tight and intense. Many of my students told me about their primary anxiety as they entered university: would they find people to “share life’s happiness and sadness with,” they wondered? A group of friends in one of my classes had even nicknamed themselves “the family,” giving each other roles within the group: father, mother, grandfather, little sister.

  After family and close friends, the university cohort became a third identifying group. No one made friends outside their class. Within the cohort, the monitor led the group in making sure that every member succeeded in school. When homework was assigned, the monitor would ask one smart student to complete it so everyone else could copy the work. The success of the group meant more than recognition for the individual.

  I was beginning to grasp the implications of this, the way it makes relationships more important than tasks or efficiency. It explained why, when I walked through town in the afternoons, I saw a line of men sitting on their heels, looking out toward the sea. They weren’t doing anything; they were just being together. It explained why, if I ran into a student on campus on her way to rehearsal, she joined me for coffee first; our relationship was more important than punctuality. And the importance of in-group relationship even affected the understanding of what was ethical in their country. Tina told me that she once got a traffic ticket from a police officer. She paid it, but when she went home and told her family, her brother—also a policeman—got angry with her. “Why didn’t you tell him you are my sister?” he demanded. “Then you wouldn’t have had to pay it.” In this country, the laws existed only for people you didn’t know.

  The tightness of relationships meant that people were often able to communicate much with only a glance or a word. They were so intimate that they didn’t need to be direct. I started to recognize this, to figure out that when Tina said, “It’s so hot today,” what she meant is that she needed a drink or wanted me to invite her out for ice cream. When I answered her correctly, she would smile slyly and say, “I think you understand me.”