I went on my first mission trip in June 1991. For years before that, Tony Campolo’s sermons motivated me to travel to a third-world country. His message was simple: authentic Christianity demands social justice. Giving to others is not an option but a command.
The choice for Nicaragua was random. I had wanted to go for years but had difficulty finding time in my schedule. When a week opened up in June of 91, I looked over several missions’ organizations that had trips for that specific week. The only one that fit the dates was a trip to Nicaragua. We went to an orphanage in Vera Cruz, a community outside Managua. I was immediately thrown into such hard-core poverty that it gave culture shock a new meaning. Horrible living conditions, kids sleeping on greasy foam mattresses, and nothing but small amounts of rice and beans every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Our sleeping conditions were better but still challenging. With no A/C, I woke up every 15 minutes in a pool of sweat, the sound of mosquitoes buzzing in my ear and the pitter-patter of rat’s feet as they ran across the attic above me.
I got violently sick and lost 5 pounds in 24 hours. I still remember lying in bed, arching my back with wracking stomach pain, with nothing left in me to vomit. When I flew back after 1 week and set foot on US soil, I thought, “Thank God I’m an American. I am so blessed to live in a country with so much opportunity.”
Then, my mind shifted to those kids. I watched a woman stirring a pot of rice and beans over an open fire, calmly swinging an old rage while hundreds of flies buzzed around her like a Biblical plague. I saw kids playing in the yard, seemingly oblivious to their poverty. When one of the team members asked a kid why she was limping, she said matter of factly, “Ratones” (the rats nibble on our feet and night and leave open sores).
The experience was so overwhelming it was difficult to know where to help. That week, we built a swing set from equipment left by another team. It seems ridiculous in light of their real needs, yet the kids were overjoyed with a swing set in their backyard. In retrospect, even before we built the swing, the kids would play in the backyard as if everything was fine. I would repeatedly see it in my future mission trips: the ability for children to deny their suffering in play. Sociologist Peter Berger talks about signs of transcendence—indications within humanity pointing to something “other,” something supernatural. One is the Argument from play. When one is engaged in play, there is a separation from the serious world into a joyful and eternal universe. There is a suspension of time. Even when adults play, they momentarily regain that feeling of deathlessness from childhood. Children are not the only ones to escape to forms of play in the face of acute suffering: Russians performed a concert as Leningrad was under siege. Germans went to concerts during the Allied bombing. Play constitutes a signal of transcendence—man’s intrinsic nature in play points beyond itself to a supernatural justification.
I returned the following year and started bringing people with me in 1993. As the groups and work expanded, the question always remained, “What’s the best way to help?” I’ve concluded that there is no correct answer. In a world of insurmountable needs, do something. Hold a kid’s hand, raise money to build a new building, buy the kids some ice cream, educate the kids to help them break the cycle of poverty—it’s all valid. Do something.
