A local megachurch has been sending “missionaries” to Haiti and other countries for brief stints of about one week. I don’t know what they do there, probably help with construction (at least, I hope it’s something useful) but afterward then they can say they’ve done missionary work.
I’ve known actual missionaries. They spent years in the field, often doing clinic work in rural hospitals or digging wells. Their way of “evangelism”, if you call it that, is to help desperate people get healthy, build infrastructure, and find education so they can get out of poverty. It takes a major chunk of their lives to do this, often with the aid of a medical education that would be very lucrative here in the States.
If you spend a week in some poverty-stricken area, you’re not a missionary, you’re a compassion tourist. And the megachurch website (which I won’t dignify with a link) makes clear that the purpose is for the trip to be a personal eye-opener. Not a bad thing in itself, certainly, but they shouldn’t call themselves “missionaries”.
Anyway, the story is all over the local news that some of these compassion-tourists (always referred to as “missionaries”) were prevented from easily getting home by the Haiti quake this week. They had to make their way to the Dominican Republic to fly out. As of this morning they had made it back to the states and were on their way to Atlanta. The church is holding a “prayer event” for the stricken country now.
…An 11-member church team crossed by bus from Cap-Haitien, a city on Haiti’s northern coast, to Santiago in the Dominican Republic, the country that shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti.
“Praise the Lord that our team is safe in Santiago, Dominican Republic, with our GO ministries partners that are located there,” Mark Warren, the church’s executive pastor, wrote on the church’s Web site Wednesday afternoon. “The team is making arrangements to fly out of the Dominican Republic to the States in the next day or two.” …
Pantagraph: Local missionaries slowly making their way home from Haiti..
I’m sorry, I can’t let that go by. Did the Lord care more to protect these rich Americans than the poor Haitians? Pat Robertson thinks so, and it’s implicit in the praise for “protection” of our locals. It makes you wonder why they didn’t decide to stay for a month or two and help out? Why flee the country? Why not find an aid agency and offer to put your shoulder to the wheel?
Here’s a Charity Navigator page on how to Help survivors of the Earthquake in Haiti. Great! I thought, until I recognized one of the highly-rated organizations on their list as having provided a jet for Sarah Palin to travel around in. Then there’s the Better Business Bureau’s Charities providing Haiti Earthquake Relief. I spent some time studying their profiles. Organizations that say their purpose is “to glorify Jesus Christ” or some such nonsense (as if working for women’s rights or children’s health weren’t justification enough for a charity) were immediately ruled out.
I picked Partners In Health, because Dr. Paul Farmer has been working in Haiti for a long time. Experience, I assume, matters as much as intention, maybe more. For this disaster his website says to make the donation through Stand With Haiti. You might find a different agency that suits you better. Don’t know how much to give? Me either, so I decided arbitrarily on one day’s pay. It doesn’t seem like enough but if we all pitch in…
NOTES:
- Here’s Boston.com The Big Picture: Earthquake In Haiti.
- …and also from Boston.com, Haiti 48 hours later
I did Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross, but there were many on the list I wish I could have donated to. There are a lot of people down there who aren’t about glorifying God, but about helping people because it’s what people should do.
Groups like the one above make me sick. If you have the resources to get your own folks out, shouldn’t you have the resources to cross back over the border with food, water, anything else that may be of use? Isn’t that what you were there for? If I’d been there, I’d want to come home, sure. But as long as I could dig through rubble with my bare hands, I don’t think I’d be able to square it with my conscience. Not if I could help without distracting rescuers. I wouldn’t want them wasting their resources on me, but I’d want to do all I could to help.
Maybe I’m being harsh, but the fact that these folks’ first instinct was to run away rather than stay and do the hard work kind of just destroys any credibility they had as these great humanitarians. Shows they were just a bunch of useless jackasses who shouldn’t have been there to begin with. So, fine. Run away and pray. Better than whining to the Red Cross that you haven’t had a cheeseburger and had to sleep on the ground for two days.
I’m going to go finish exploding somewhere else now….
What Dana said except for the “Maybe I’m being harsh…” part
I’m glad they got out. I don’t want their ilk “helping”. They’re all about self-glorification in the guise of doing something “for the lord”. Would even one of them dig with their hands without opening their mouths to try and save a soul? I’d be shocked, though pleased.
Yeah, maybe I’m even “harsher” than Dana… Sorry, but it’s my experience.
My sister sent me this link:
https://donate.pih.org/page/contribute/haiti_earthquake?source=earthquake&subsource=email113donor
This is the organization the Clinton Foundation got a hold of to connect them to donors and such.
Massive amounts of aid are going into Haiti. Many “charities” are involved. They don’t need my pittance now.
After things settle, I have it in mind do donate directly to an orphanage.
Missionaries go to other lands with the primary motive of convincing the people there to think as they, the missionaries, do about the notion of dieties and such. I despise them for that.
Things are looking up for Haiti. A Christian group is sending them solar-powered digital bibles.