Missionary trips are often glorified vacations. “Voluntourism.”
High school/college kids come over, build a school and then bounce. It would be better if that money was spent hiring local people to build that school. It relies on this racist thinking that somehow those poor Black or South American or whatever people are too stupid to know how to build things/survive, and they need some random white kids to come in and safe the day.
It’s for show, it’s to make the “missionaries” feel good about themselves and get some nice profile pictures instead of actually doing anything.
There are cases of “hospitals” being started by random people with no medical training - one I’m thinking of killed lots of babies. Somehow a random unqualified white person is just better and smarter, that they can fix all the problems.
It’s such a fucking farce. The real problems of the global south are that the centuries of exploitation and colonialism destroyed those countries economies and ways of living. The pseudo charity does nothing but exist as colonialism lite.
(I am excluding the rare groups of actually qualified people. I’ve talked to nurses and such who have done good work in places like Haiti. But they also did the same kind of work here - the kind of people I met assembling fentanyl test kits.)
Missionary trips are often glorified vacations. “Voluntourism.”
High school/college kids come over, build a school and then bounce. It would be better if that money was spent hiring local people to build that school. It relies on this racist thinking that somehow those poor Black or South American or whatever people are too stupid to know how to build things/survive, and they need some random white kids to come in and safe the day.
It’s for show, it’s to make the “missionaries” feel good about themselves and get some nice profile pictures instead of actually doing anything.
There are cases of “hospitals” being started by random people with no medical training - one I’m thinking of killed lots of babies. Somehow a random unqualified white person is just better and smarter, that they can fix all the problems.
It’s such a fucking farce. The real problems of the global south are that the centuries of exploitation and colonialism destroyed those countries economies and ways of living. The pseudo charity does nothing but exist as colonialism lite.
(I am excluding the rare groups of actually qualified people. I’ve talked to nurses and such who have done good work in places like Haiti. But they also did the same kind of work here - the kind of people I met assembling fentanyl test kits.)