My first missions trip

I went on my very first missions trip way back in November 1994, to Northern Thailand.

I was still a young, rather immature Christian in the church then, and looking back, I have forgotten why I signed up for that trip. Perhaps it was a friend who had asked me along. I knew nothing about missions at all and was certainly the last person to be interested in missions. My idea of getting on a plane was for luxurious holidays to far off lands after purchasing a convenient tour package, and of lots of sightseeing and plenty of shopping.

Well, in 1994, I joined the team for this special church-organized tour called a ‘missions trip’. We were still a very small church at that time, and so we combined with another church to send two teams, one from each church, to the eight-day trip to minister to the Akha tribes in Northern Thailand.

In the weeks prior to the trip, I remembered having to go to the other church on Saturday afternoons (because we didn’t have our own building) for briefings and preparations. During one session, we practised singing Akha hymns. At another session, we had fun trying to take each other’s temperature and blood pressure, because we would also be accompanied by a medical team of doctors and nurses.

I think, at that time, my naive impression of a ‘missions trip’ slowly became one of – going to a foreign land to give the poor tribal people free medical consultations and medicine, and show them that we Singaporeans could sing in Akha.

The Akha hill tribes occupies the mountains and lands around the Golden Triangle – Northern Thailand, Burma, Laos and even the southern most part of China. Mainly farmers, they are animists, and superstitutions abound in their culture.

One of their most heartless superstititions was – when twins were born, they believed that one of them was human but the other was a demon and as they could not tell which was which, both twin newborns were taken out of the village, abandoned and left to die.

The Akha are also taught their family history at a very young age, and as they had no written language, they learnt their genealogies by heart. A Christian missionary once said that he listened to an Akha recite his genealogy all the way back to the first Akha… to the “plain in the land of Shina” – Genesis 11:2, where God scattered all the peoples after he confounded “their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

So… these were the people we were going to minister to, on my very first missions trip!