Yes, I take great joy in taking people to some of my favorite places in Europe, and plan to continue doing so. As we speak, we're gearing up for our summer tour after a corona-hiatus.
But as I look back at my somewhat lengthy life, I realize some of the experiences that have marked or formed me the most have not been in Western Europe, but in one developing country or another.
I've told this story before: when I was turning nine, we returned to the US from four years in Perth, Western Australia, traveling by ship across the Indian Ocean, eventually making our way to Europe. Our first port of call was Colombo, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). Not only was I nine, I was a very impressionable 9-year-old; this is offset, however, by an extremely patchy memory.
The one thing that is seared into my memory is the image of a boy, perhaps my age, perhaps a little younger, scooting along the dusty road, his legs permanently and unnaturally folded up behind his back, pushing a tin can along with a few coins in it.
I'm sure I kept walking to keep up with my family. But inside, I stopped.
I'm not sure how long I figuratively stood there. In some ways I'm still standing there. It was later explained to me that this boy's handlers most likely intentionally broke his legs so he would never walk again, consigning him to a life of begging for other people's profit.
This is admittedly an extreme example, and you can understand why I came away changed. But I could point to many other experiences:
watching Zimbabwean women scrubbing their pots and pans with dirt outside their grass huts
spending time in beaten down Haiti, where real hope of a bright future is a rare commodity
visiting our sponsored Dominican child who lived with his family under a bridge and seeing what a hopeful difference our meager contribution could mean for him
taking a lesson from the joy on Brazil's favela dwellers in spite of their dire circumstances
It's hard to come away from any of these experiences without, at the very least, a wake-up alarm going off in your soul. Each one has untold potential to spur gratitude, awareness, perspective, and I could go on.
I'll close by saying such an experience doesn't have to be a "mission trip". (I know many of my readers have been on lots of them, and so have I.) But what if we were to rearrange our budgetary priorities in a way that made it possible to simply make a visit to a developing country with no mission other than discovery. Connection. Self-education. Understanding.
I guarantee you -- no matter what your destination -- if you go as a learner, you will come back wiser. Different. Changed.