Fully Back

I have been on a few missions trips, and I find that it takes a long time to get back and turn my brain from mush into something resembling functional.
First off, I'm not a huge fan of plane rides. I have trouble sleeping on planes and don't really feel comfortable napping in airports. It took us somewhere around 30 hours to get to our destination and I was so wiped out when we got there. We didn't leave Calgary until 11pm, so by the time we finally got to Jinghong, I had been awake for 48 hours (with a couple of 20 minute or less cat naps thrown in). I'm surprised I woke up at all.
Once we got there, we found that the orphanage was on the second floor of an apartment building. The group we were working with owns the second through fifth floors of the apartment (the first is for shops). The orphanage is on the second floor, the third floor is offices and a leprosy clinic, the fourth floor is guest quarters and conference room, and the fifth floor headquarters the HIV/AIDS project and the Commercial Sex Workers Project (getting women off of the streets). The balcony on the second floor was huge (literally bigger than my apartment) and that is where the playground was going. The plan was to lay down a cement floor with tiles and then to put the playground equipment on top. And the troubles began right away.
Communication, I learned, is very key to these sorts of trips, and very hard to do. Part of the problem was that the man who had originally envisioned this project had ended up having to go back to Australia after everything was too far in motion to stop. And then his replacement worked with us for a while before he too had to leave. When we finally arrived, we were dealing with people who had been there for a month and didn't really know much about the project specifically. They were a young couple, very nice people, who had only been in China for a year, which raised another problem.
We only spoke English, and the project manager, a Chinese national, didn't speak much English at all, so we had to rely on the young American couple to translate everything for us. Their Chinese (I think it was Mandarin, but I can't remember anymore) was good, but still limited. It wasn't a problem when they helped us order food, but to speak about more technical things, such as tools and mixing cement, they didn't have the vocabulary. To be fair, I didn't always know what they were talking about in English, I can't imagine trying to translate into another language.
Add to that, the fact that in China they lay tiles very differently than we do here. The project manager had assumed that we knew how they do it, and we had assumed that we would just do it the same way we would back home. We ended up wasting a day and a half in trying to figure out what we were doing and whether it would work. The project manager hadn't really done concrete and tiles before, so he didn't know exactly how to do it, which meant he couldn't really explain it to us. It would be like me telling someone from China how to lay concrete and tile here. I could give them the basic idea and do some online research, but when it came time to actually doing it, I would be guessing and hoping it worked out right. Eventually we decided to do it a more North American way, since we knew how to do that and that it would work.
Truthfully, I felt a little bad about that. In some ways it felt like we were being the knowledgeable Westerners coming in to solve the problems of the stupid foreigners. That wasn't really the attitude we had, and we did try it, but it just didn't seem to be working - the tile wasn't going to stay and the concrete underneath would just crumble. We learned later that how we had been told to do it was basically correct, but the details had been wrong so it wouldn't have worked (we needed to adjust the ratio or something like that) so it was good we changed it.
But this is the dilemma I have found myself in since coming back. There are some who feel that short term missions trips do more damage than good and that they aren't worth the expense. I had never given it a great deal of thought, but I could see that point. I still thought that they were a fine thing to do if done properly, but I have begun to waver. In my community development class we have been told repeatedly that true development and change does not come when we do for locals what they could do for themselves. In this case, we didn't need to do the work. We could raise the money and donate it to them (there are even issues with that, but this post is long enough already) and they could have hired locals to do the job, and it would have been done without issue, and probably twice as quick. So what was the point of us going?
The only thing that is keeping me from writing off missions trips altogether is the change it has on the people who go on the trips. The American couple who worked there were inspired by a missions trip in their youth to work overseas. Would they have discovered that calling otherwise? It is hard to hear that sort of thing in North America. There are so many other, louder voices telling us to make money and buy things and live this 'American Dream' if you will. Right from birth that is the message preached. In school, the goal of education has been reduced to 'get a good education to get a good job to make lots of money'. When I was in grades 11 and 12, that is what I heard all the time. I had to make the choices then that would lead me to the best possible college to the career that would set me up for life. I was never comfortable with that, and I'm still not.
That may be why I have drifted as much as I have. I have never been comfortable with the message of 'life is about making money', but I have either been unaware of my options, or just scared of stepping out. I may not like rampant consumerism, but it is what I was raised in (not by my parents, but by society and culture - my parents were very good with trying to teach otherwise and not pressuring us into high-income jobs just to make money) and it is comfortable. Heck, that is half of its appeal - it is a comfortable mindset because it is devoted to one's own comfort.
Anyway, the end result of China is that it freaked me out because I saw up close what it would mean to leave home and go overseas. Talking with the young American couple and seeing how their lives were different here than they would have been in North America made me realise that it is a complete change. I knew that before, but seeing it is different. But at the same time, I kept having a confidence, even in my freak, that I could do it. Going to China didn't provide clear cut answers and diamond sharp clarity, but it did give me more realistic perspective and a feeling of confidence that I can sometimes access. That seems to be how God talks to me - he doesn't use a clear voice, but more of nudges and small nods. I don't know if that's normal, but it's what I know.
Also, I ate donkey stew. Tasty.

P.S. I didn't name names or get to specific with details in this post for a reason. Though the religious situation in China isn't nearly as bad as some would have us believe, it is still China, so I don't want to push things and get people in trouble.

P.P.S. The kids at the orphanage were adorable. I can't think of them without having that happy-sad feeling. They were cute and wonderful and precious and being with them made me happy, but I was also sad that they were just abandoned and that no one wanted them.