No, I Did Not Move to Africa to be a Missionary

But in my attempt to distance myself from white-saviorism, I found myself sitting timidly on the sidelines.

I’m terrible at negotiating and haggling. I cannot be bothered with any of it. It makes me feel itchy - I am certain I will offend either the buyer or the seller and they will think ill of me. Which I cannot abide. This is why, if you ever see me in charge of collecting cash at a yard sell, you should come running. You want to offer me fifteen bucks for that entire patio set? The one we priced at $75 and paid far, far more for? That sounds reasonable. Just get it out of here, thanks. (And maybe don’t tell my husband what you paid.)

The weekend before we left for Africa we laid out every item we had not yet sold on Craigslist on our front lawn and hoped that by the end of the day we’d only have to make one trip to Goodwill to donate the leftovers. Our interest in getting rid of every single thing far outweighed our drive to make a whole bunch of cash.

But a funny thing happened. Somehow word got out that this young couple on the corner was selling everything to move to Africa and people came and just started over-paying for things, wishing us well and letting us know how cool they thought it was that we were doing the thing. The thing that people talk about doing but rarely ever do.

I was riding high on this outpouring of neighborly generosity and support when a well-dressed woman I didn’t know approached me holding one of my favorite ceramic mugs and told me that even though she didn’t need another coffee cup, she wanted to donate to our mission trip. She smiled broadly and handed me fifty dollars.

“I’m just so proud of what you’re doing,” she said, dripping with sincerity.

Friends, I did not know what to do.

I could tell she was incredibly pleased to be contributing to the Good Lord’s Work by paying forty-eight dollars over asking price for my mug, but there was no way that I could, in good conscience, accept her “donation”.

“I’m so sorry, but we’re not going to Africa to do missions work,” I said. “We’re just going to volunteer… independently.” I gave her a lopsided, apologetic smile.

Her whole face closed like a fan.

I extended the cash back towards her, and she took it, looking down at the twenties and the ten in one hand and the mug in the other. I could tell she was at a loss, poor thing. Her restless eyes were clearly trying to make sense of this tragic turn of events. I thought about telling her that I was a Christian to soften the blow, but that felt clumsy and disingenuous and would likely lead to an even more awkward conversation. It was unlikely that I was her kind of Christian.

“How about ten, then?” She said with a small smile, trying to reassemble her face back into magnanimity.

“That’s really generous, thank you so much.” I said, accepting the bill.

As I watched her walk away, I wanted to crawl under a table. I wondered how many other people had made this assumption, playing back snippets of conversations in my mind. Of course people would conclude that we were going to Africa to save souls, isn’t that what well-educated, clean-cut, good-hearted white couples did overseas?

Sigh.

The irony is that in a particularly spirit-infused moment in Mexico in my youth, I had stood up during an alter-call of sorts and publicly committed my future path to ministry, specifically missions work abroad. While on a short-term mission trip.

Photo by Mic Narra on Unsplash

Allow me to unpack this.

Every year during spring break in high school, my Baptist youth group in Tucson, Arizona headed south of the border to a city called Mexicali in order to “equip, empower and engage” the locals to advance the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We set up camp on a large piece of property owned by Azusa Pacific University outside of the city with hundreds of other teens, youth pastors, translators and musicians in order to, in the words of sponsors, “willfully surrender what Christ asks of us so that others might come alive.”

In practice, this looked like partnering with local churches in order to sing worship songs, dramatically reenact Bible stories, and do crafts with local youth for five days. The hope was that the Mexican kids would be inspired by our lightness of spirit and our joyful dispositions, and that they would be moved by the Holy Spirit to commit their lives to Christ (after which they would go home and tell their families about this incredible transformation and they, too, would escape the penalty for their sins and accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior.)

If anything in the above paragraph made you cringe, I see you.

Here’s the thing, though: I loved it so much.

I loved that I was spending my Spring Break doing something valuable and selfless. I loved the matching tee shirts that we all got. I loved waking up in a tent in a dirt field, brushing my teeth and spitting into a communal pit that we had dug out upon arrival, and lining up with dozens of friends to eat tepid scrambled eggs on fresh tortillas.

I loved the local kids, who would run up to meet us when our white 16-passenger vans pulled up every morning. I loved sweating it out in a weathered neighborhood church, singing “Pescadores Yo Os Hare” (“I will Make them Fisher’s of Men) while holding up the lyrics on poster boards so the kids could join in. I loved making beaded prayer bracelets with the girls while the boys played soccer in the streets.

We were walking the walk, totally saturated with purpose.

Most of all, I looked forward to the worship that we would do back at “tent city” at the end of the day. Hundreds of unwashed teens stood shoulder to shoulder while a worship group led us in songs under the stars, our voices rising to the heavens. When they would turn off the amps and all of the lights, and just play acoustic guitar in the dark, I would close my eyes and lift my hands up in the air and would feel flooded with the Spirit. Surely this was God’s work. I was on fire for Jesus.

Tent City

So it’s no surprise that after a particularly moving worship session, when a missionary stood up to regale us with stories from the field and concluded by asking that any among us who felt called to do overseas work please stand up, I unfolded myself from my camping chair and proudly made my commitment.

The fact that I did that, before God and men, and failed to follow through with my solemn vow, would be a source of shame for me for years.

The thing is, as much as I loved that yearly trip, there was something inside of me that felt bothered by it as well, even then, even before I grew into adulthood and began to grasp the terrible impact of things like colonialism and “manifest destiny” and Christian supremacy. Something felt voyeuristic and off. I began to see the cracks long before the whole thing fell apart.

We showed up to these communities expecting that they would delight in our arrival. We assumed that, as wealthy, (mostly) white American Christians, we had heaps of wisdom to offer, and that our suggestions and improvements would be greatly appreciated and immediately implemented. And we thought that all of this could be accomplished in a five-day, yearly outreach mission.

The hubris!

Every year when we bid the children farewell, tears would flow- theirs and ours. And I couldn’t help but wonder, Do these kids need well-intentioned ‘role models’ breezing in and out of their lives like this? What do we leave behind in our wake? My only solace was that I was “planting seeds'“ for the Kingdom. I thought that if there was any chance that our presence there kept them out of Hell for eternity, any damage done would pale in comparison to the rewards reaped.

But then, in my twenties, I stopped believing in Hell. Which is a real game-changer.

If you take the fear-based notion of eternal, conscious torment off the table, then what was even the point of going to Mexico at all? Surely there were kids in my own town I could have sung songs to and made bracelets with. Perhaps then we could have invested our “missionary" travel and food expenses into the communities in Mexico in a more practical and sustainable way.

If we weren’t so intent on saving people, perhaps we could focus instead on serving them.

Alas, when my thirty-one year-old self was confronted with an opportunity to go to Africa for half a year and make myself useful at a boarding school for orphaned kids, I felt all kinds of conflicted. I really didn’t want to get this wrong.

Would those kids feel abandoned all over again when we left? Would we be able to truly help out, or was it all just a charade? How do you volunteer in a way that isn’t totally self-serving?

I so badly wanted to distance myself from the well-intentioned teenager in Mexico that believed her whole entire purpose was to save people, who assumed that people of a “lesser” socio-economic status needed her help.

(Side note: according to a 2020 census, approximately 88% of the population of Mexico identify as Christians, so I'm not sure who we thought we were converting, but I digress.)

I wanted to go to Africa to learn from people already doing incredible, meaningful work in their own communities. I wanted to approach with my eyes and ears wide open, and offer my “services” only in collaboration with locals who could confirm that those services, were, in fact, useful. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t burdening an already exhausted organization.

When we arrived at Sabina Home and School in Uganda, I felt like I was tiptoeing through a studio apartment with a sleeping baby in it, terrified to make a noise. I was suffocating in my own shame and anxiety, worried that I would be called out as an imposter and or worse, an opportunist.

Shame weaves nightmarish stories in our minds, displacing reality, distracting us with shadow puppets on the walls.

Shame is the silence that comes after a deafening sound. Thick and paralyzing and unrelenting.

My concerns were valid, and worth exploring, but I needed to ditch the narrative in my head first. I was drowning in it.

Which is how I ended up lying in a pool of my own sweat and tears on the concrete floor of my banda, a month into our stay at Sabina, feeling completely and utterly useless, wondering what I was doing with my life.

My amazing husband in front of our banda- home sweet home

In my quest to not be a know-it-all, privileged, white savior, I wound up swinging that pendulum much too far and found myself sitting on the sidelines, afraid to meaningfully engage with those around me.

Fear is a terrible travel companion.

I would shed that fear soon, in the most unlikely of divine encounters, but first I had to lie on the floor and weep a bit.

First the weeping, then the rising.

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Author’s Disclaimer:

The conversation around the impact that missionaries have had on the developing world (both positive and negative) is a deeply nuanced and complicated one. I certainly don’t want to make broad, sweeping statements about all Christian aid organizations. I believe that many are invested in preserving the cultural identity of the people they serve, and are invested in long-term, sustainable partnerships. But many mission trips, especially short-term “voluntourism”, do far more harm than good. Here are a few thoughtful articles if you’d like to do a deeper dive (because I know y’all need more to read:

“Let the savior complex go: the real impacts of mission trips” by Ashwini Vivek

“Why I Hate Short Term Missions Trips” by Jennifer Sutherland-Miller

“Do missionaries help or harm?” by John Allen Chau (BBC)

“5 myths about voluntourism” by Ken Budd (NatGeoO)