Table Of Contents:
- How to plan for a missions trip
- Planning a short-term missions trip
- How to plan a missions trip
- Packing and final preparations for a mission trip
- Planning a mission trip – the big question
- Packing for a mission trip – convenience or common-sense?
An effective mission trip begins with packing. In Asia, bag-packing is even more important because of the limitations imposed by vehicles and the eagerness of customs officials to earn some extra pocket money from rich foreigners.
Most people from affluent countries value convenience highly. They tend to pack things so that it is easy for them to pack, to carry and to unpack. For example, if they wanted to bring pens and pencils to an orphanage they would place all them in their original packing into a bag that they could leave with the orphanage. This seems to make sense and is convenient.
However, can you imagine what the customs officer thinks when he sees a bag filled with 50 dozen beautifully packed ball-pens and another dozen 50 dozen beautifully packed pencils, plus 50 dozen erasers in their original wrappers, plus other brand-new exercise books, etc.? He doesn’t see convenience, he sees a chance to supplement his meagre salary of USD 25/month! He sees a rich foreigner who should share some of his wealth with him!
He will ask “Why you bring things to sell and you don’t declare in customs form?!” He looks stern and angry! He threatens you! And before you know it, you will be parting with a sum of money to appease him that could easily have bought 5 times more pens, pencils and erasers in a store in that country – and saved you the trouble of lugging that bag from your home country!
Sometimes we pack all the stuff for a mission trip into a huge bag so that everything is conveniently in one bag when we need to look for the stuff. However, what is convenient to us also tends to be tempting to an underpaid government official!
Also remember it is generally easier to transport several smaller bags on motorcycles or on little tricycles than one huge bag. And it is definitely easier for several people to carry several smaller bags to a remote village than to carry one huge bag.
Convenience is nice but it is often can’t be brought on a mission trip!
The shock of everything is now starting to sink in and the dust is starting to settle some.
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Great post…simple common sense…
common sense is not common among christians I think
in our eagerness to meet some needs of the mission field, we sometimes fail to see that the world around us do not see things like us and view us suspiously. We need to be wise to the whimps of the world.