I just read a heartbreaking letter from a missionary friend. She spent a decade starting and building up a bakery in Africa to support a local church and orphanage. She turned control over to the workers whom she had trained and trusted while she went back to the states to attend to some health issues. Upon her return, she found that all the materials and the profits were stolen by a manager. Additionally, he had left a false report with the police that she had assaulted his wife so that she would be thwarted in pursuing him for the loses. While it’s sad, I am not surprised because this pattern is so common.
What we don’t comprehend going into poor countries is the true nature of situation we are going into. In a place that is free for people to work and get paid well, most people will work and get paid well. Impoverished places aren’t poor because the people aren’t clever or industrious. People are poor because those with some power take advantage, and corrupt authorities won’t stop it. We have seen it over and over again.
As visitors, missionaries imagine themselves as emissaries from God, but instead are often simply seen as a source of financial gain. They don’t realize it because the missionaries themselves are poor relative to people back home. They may have an older model car or shop less frequently than others. To folks lacking basic necessities, missionaries are just another type of tourists who arrive on jet airplanes and wear clothes without patches. To some of the locals, they are easy marks who wouldn’t miss any money they can be tricked out of because it’s easily replaceable as our average week’s wages may represent a year of work for them.
Operating under the notion of “teaching a man to fish,” the missionary goes about building a bakery or a school or a hospital. While some are won over by love and generosity and will be helped materially as well as spiritually, we should be reminded that it only took one Judas to bring down Christ. Working on a small scale, we can forget even relatively small amounts of power can breed corruption and even a tiny whiff of cash can bring out those with sticky fingers.
I have my own stories from living in China and Thailand. Some of the locals befriended us out of pure motives and some came to us to enrich themselves. Upon arrival in both places, I was warned of some shady characters by name, but some I discovered all on my own. Each story is so disappointing. Some spun tales of woe so that foreign teachers would give them money, I had a class treasurer abscond with the funds from a writing prize, and there was a beloved secretary who embezzled profits from a school. Even one of our college administrators tried to hold my friend’s transcripts hostage for favors because she had bragged about knowing someone at the embassy. Desperate people will do desperate things to get ahead in a place that has no clear path forward. Outsiders who have no longterm attachment to the community are easy prey.
The bigger issue is that in many places, men already know how to fish, but their access to lakes and rivers has been restricted, so to speak. Poverty is often the result of systematic issues and is not easily remedied by short-term missions. If it were simple, it probably would have been fixed by now. (The worst part is when you find out the role your home country has inevitably played in making situation worse to begin with.)
We shouldn’t let the existence of bad people prevent us from doing good. Instead, we need to be well-informed and level-headed about the reality of helping in a broken world. Hopefully, my friend will find a way forward in the restoration of her bakery so it can continue to help her beloved community.
