Why is it that people go on mission trips? Some might say that it is because they want to experience another culture so that they can develop a more realistic understanding of how the rest of the world lives. Others may say their main purpose is to assist our fellow man in his struggles and eventually religiously convert him. I have struggled with this question for a while now and have mulled it over every summer for the past three years. I was raised with a heart to serve and believe that as a follower of Jesus, I am called to serve others for my whole life. Prior to my trip to Tanzania this past June, I thought that I had a basic idea of how most mission trips work. I thought that a good group of Christians would travel to wherever, whether down the street or across the world, and that they would partner with another good group of Christians and help to aid them in whatever way possible. The group might minister to people in their village or provide them with resources they were incapable of obtaining. That kind of mission work really is the most common and well known to me, and I perceived it was what the majority of mission work entailed. I knew that this was not the only way mission work was done, but the other way seemed fairly far-fetched to me and pretty obsolete, at least at the time.
This other way was the kind of missions you would only hear about at large conferences and on television. It was someone, or group of people, targeting a primarily unreached people group in order to aid them in some way and eventually convert them to Christ. Prior to this trip, I had been to the Dominican Republic a couple of times and had participated in numerous service projects in the United States, so I assumed that I had a pretty good feel for the mission field as I had seen many different scenarios play out in different kinds of situations. Before this trip our knowledge about Toloha village was pretty minimal. We had one real source of information on life in the village and, therefore, had very little to base our preconceptions of the conditions in which we were about to be immersed. Consequently, as I prepared, I fell back on previous experience to guide my preconception and didn’t think much of it.
But, despite the hundreds of examples of physical thirst that I saw, their thirst for something more than water was what struck me like those machetes hacking up the pipes. I saw a thirst for someone to care about them when adults and children alike would constantly barrage me with their stories of anything from their last trip to the market to their dream of obtaining an education and making it to America. I saw a thirst for knowledge, when person after person, young and old, would approach us and ask about the surveying technology, how it worked and what it did. Finally, I saw a thirst for a purpose. These people want a reason to live; many of them spend all of their time trying to find a way to make any kind of money so they can provide for their family while others, most of the women and girls, simply worked and worried day after day to get “clean-enough”water. They are stuck in a continuous generational and circumstantial cycle of living just to get by, and they yearn for more than that, much more.
The villagers knew that we, the Americans, may be able to quench their physical thirsts, but they were unsure whether or not we could satisfy their thirst for the other intangible things. They seemed to pursue the answer to that question but came up short. Unfortunately, the other team members and I could not sit down and listen to every story, show every eager villager how we worked the GPS system, or provide those with the deepest thirst a purpose to live. This lack of provision on our part hurt me deeply because I knew that no matter how long we stayed and how much time or effort we gave, the end result of the problem would always churn out the same solution, disappointment.
The situation is dire and is more than meets the eye. I went on this mission trip expecting to return with the same feeling that I had upon returning from every other mission trip. Instead, I have experienced a real problem that I did not perceive before but one that needs to be addressed collectively and passionately by the people involved in the church and in the Toloha Partnership. We need not take this lightly because there is no passing it on to the next guy. I believe we have been chosen by God to aid these people and that their eternal lives may rest in our willingness to be obedient to God’s cry for His people in Toloha.
Josh serves as our Team Videographer and also assists in the engineering and planning aspects of our water project. He graduated from Arendell Parrott Academy in 2013 and will be pursuing a bachelor’s degree from Baylor University starting this Fall. His mother, Diane, is one of the first Toloha Partnership team members to share in Daniel’s vision for Toloha.