I once visited a small, remote settlement in an African country. The guy who sold cigarettes , canned food and had a solar panel, so that's where people paid to charge their phones and watched football. The school was run down and closed anyway, because teachers hadn't been paid for more than a year. The health station, where people came to give birth, consisted of three mud huts and a shed, with no electricity (but an amazing health worker). The water pump was the only clean drinking water for several kilometers.

The church and the the priest's house looked like they were teleported directly from Western suburbia.

Priorities. They show what people are really made of.

It's noticeable that with the established churches influence waning and congregations dropping in the west that the clergy no longer have the biggest house in the community. In fact I have no idea where the local vicar lives - all I know is that it's not in the vicarage.

Its been much the same story with those other pillars of the community, the family doctors. In the small town where I live one of the most impressive houses in the old part has been known since before WW2 as 'the doctors house'. Post war doctors lived in nice but slightly more modest accommodation, our generation downsized yet again to various detached house and the current medics live in starter homes on new estates like everyone else.

Times are hard in the professions.

Personally, I think the money spent on the church would have been more useful in getting the health station electricity and a refrigerator for medicines. Or maybe on paying the teachers so that people could get out of poverty. But hey, the faster people die, and the more of their limited time on Earth they spend praying, the faster they get to Heaven I guess.

My experience of small communities in remote areas - be they in Africa or anywhere else - is that God in whatever local form he happens to take plays a far bigger role in their lives than he does these days in the countries we tend to hail from. I'm not sure many of them would regard a fridge as a reasonable swap for a religious leader. I once spent some time with a Peace Corps volunteer from Mali who'd turned to alcohol to deal with his frustration over his inability to get past the 'God will provide' attitude in the village he was working in.

It made me very sad to read your post/thoughts Surfy
It is very difficult to apply the old Indian adage:
'Do not judge another until you have walked a mile in her moccasins,' unless you get out of your own moccasins first...

Please read this thread in detail

Specially:
https://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hu...726#post618532

https://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hu...726#post618541

It is NOT about the person itself. It is about that we think we can help. Think they need help. Think we are able to help. Did we help? Did we help also if we dont harm others directly?

Surfy

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Then, if you still want to criticize them, you are a mile away and you've got their shoes.

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Made I larf!

I tend to agree with the posters who are sceptical of missionaries, in fact the whole concept of missionaries is a gross invasion of other peoples lives and culture.

Norway has a tradition of missionary projects, some are really beneficial to the community, but they all demand a payback. Stayed in Guesthouse at Lodwar Lutheren Hospital in Tanzania, run and funded by Norwegian fundamentalist Christians and our gov. Aid money. Really well run and efficient, an enormous benefit to the community, but they still demand "their pound of flesh". The "righteousness" was overpowering, the contempt for Afrika and "heathens" was a given in any conversation.

Not all bad - there was a project to build a walled refuge for Albinos, in Afrika it is a problem that people cut bits off them to use in Traditional Medicine charms and potions. An earlobe here, a fingertip there, some body parts are more potent than others. The Norwegians try to stop this by protecting the Albinos. You can't argue against that by saying it is traditional culture being destroyed!

You can question their motivation and methods. Too many times there is uncovered sexual and psychological abuse in religious communities for that to be an unfortunate coincidence. Politically they tend to be far-right, which has consequences for their attitude to local politics and politicians.

Following this thread with interest

Ride safe

Peter in Oslo

The one I'm talking about was financed by evangelical churches in the US. They made a choice what to spend their money on. And being told that God wants them to give money to build a church makes them sleep well at night, not even considering if their money would be better spent making a real difference in the life of poor people.

The thing that really hit me was how religion was divisive political force, that churches openly bought influence from politicians making sure they were able to grow their institutional and (even more important) personal wealth. Since being religious is the norm, nobody dares to question religious authority. And I know better than to put locals in a position where they have to choose between being nice to the stranger or defend their way of life.

This thread has drifted way off the travel aspects.

Its a tough call, keep Africa as a museum where death from medieval circumstances are just what happens, or send Westerners (possibly they could wear red uniforms and do Welsh male voice singing? ) to sort them out? Strikes me as none of my business what Africans do on their own continent and the only way is to lead by example if I'm ever there again.

Travel wise I say away from the highly religious anyway. I did once end up on a Christian Fundamentalist stag night. It had its moments like the old boy trying to convince a lap dancer to give up her wicked ways at £10 a minute while staring down what little top she was wearing

Andy

I do agree to Peter`s view.

The history has shown that missionaries always used seculary strategies and professional technical competence to sell their "god argument of a good life" to the people. In the time of classical colonialism e.g. in Africa that mentioned white missionars were talking to white christian people about black and non-cristian people. These missionars only loved the black people as recipients of their efforts in point of religion and civilisation. They didn`t love and respected the black people as believers of their own gods and culture.

In today times only a few call it still colonialism. Today it`s better known as globalisation and the faith of religion got replaced through common known capitalistic economical principles. But religious and cultural behaviors in the "west" have changed too and newly developed - the quality rating of this depends only in the different views of you, the reader.

Meanwhile the distance of development in non cristinal cultures or non west-cultures e.g. in africa have grown much bigger compared to the times of classical colonialism. That was caused and forced through the developement of the rich west world who from the beginning on had advantages in form of high education levels and financial power.

Because of their history I am very sceptical if missionaries are a good future-proof tool to enable development aid. For sure they can build and bring a safe water supply to some, for sure they can provide knowledge in agriculture, for sure they can seal particular basic leaks in education, for sure they can help with a basic medical aid in some places. But I don`t see them as a catalysator for economical development, for creating a stable, modern and area-wide health system or for driving educational systems in these countries.

Don`t get me wrong, I appreciate all these little actions missionaries are doing but in my opinion this century isn`t anymore the one for missionaries. Only because of the religion deal they are doing.

If we want to make "the world better" e.g. for african countries we need other powerful mechanisms driven through other states. I think it`s also clear that a lot of cultures will disappear or change in a way we cannot foresee in this process. I am aware that this subject is a highly complex one and that it is driving the world since centuries but in my conclusion it is time to accept and to review that history and present still shows that a religion driven transformation is not the right way to do this.
I belief that you as an active christ will tolerate and forgive me for my nonbeliever view of life.

For some people the various flavours that religion comes in all taste like vanilla (or chicken - pyo analogy). I once went to a wedding at a Greek Orthodox church in West London where one of the ushers (+ his wife) didn't turn up for the ceremony. It turned out they'd gone to the synagogue down the road by mistake, sat through the wedding they'd also been having and wondered why they didn't recognise anyone. They didn't work out they'd gone to the wrong place until they got to the reception ...

My missionary position is occasionally one I like to fall back on.

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