Member-only story
Exploitation at it’s finest.
Do you know what a lot of these “service/mission” trips all have in common?
They all want to “help” the people in underdeveloped countries. Primarily Africa.
I put “help” in quotation marks because most of the time, these people are just looking for a way to boost their testosterone by telling people they went to a different country to help others.
If you’re Christian, you know what I’m talking about.
But you’re not supposed to go into these countries with the mind set of “saving” the people in that country.
This mindset has multiple negative effects on the people you’re trying to help and to be honest — you seem like a dick.
I recently went to a training meeting on this subject and here are some of the negative effects I learned about the “savior complex”.
You are dehumanizing the people of that community.
What I mean by dehumanizing is that you come into these spaces with a preconceived notion of what homelessness and poverty are.
There’s always a stigma of what poverty and homelessness look like and when you come in with this particular mindset, you’ve already failed…
