Arrival

5.17.15

It is really starting to hit me that I am on this plane to go to Tanzania. Ever since last year, I knew I was called to do missionary work, and this trip is the perfect trip to teach me what that calling really means to the Gospel and to myself. I'm sure that this trip will be personally rewarding, but I am uncertain about how our trip
will affect those around us.

This reminded me of something I read in Toxic Charity:
"But responsible development efforts such as these are sometimes thwarted by well-meaning missioners who have little understanding of the negative impacts of their good deeds (Lupton, 18)." I don't want to enter this country with the wrong motive and the wrong strategy. I thought to myself, "is what we are doing in Tanzania toxic charity? Will it go against all that we've learned and studied throughout the semester in Integration and Development?"

But when we first met Daudi, he reminded us that we are not there to change the whole country of Africa, but we can start one person and one community at a time. That was a lot of confirmation and reassurance to me. The money that each of us students are paying to go to Tanzania could be used to pay workers to do all the jobs that we did, but that wouldn't make the same impact on the community. Then I realized that each one of us has a calling and purpose for being in Tanzania at that time. We do not know what type of seed we will be able to plant or what seed will be planted in us, but we do know that those seeds will be planted because we were in the right place.