It took one week and $25,000 for 11 teenagers from First Presbyterian Church in Everett to build a house for a family in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
“We just stood back and looked at what we did,” said Darcie Cooper, a church youth leader who organized the trip.
“There was no roof when we got there, no septic tank. We could truly see a difference from the beginning of the week to the end of the week.”
First Presbyterian is one of thousands of American churches that has sent groups of teenagers, some as young as the sixth grade, around the world this summer.
They build houses, host Bible lessons and deliver food in countries often marked by poverty.
To Cooper and others who have taken similar trips, it doesn’t matter that Mexican workers could have built a dozen houses for the $25,000 it cost for the team from First Presbyterian to travel there.
“Even though it costs a lot of money, we’re instilling in people’s hearts and minds the good of helping,” said Byron Ahina, director of Yucatan Helping Hands, the organization through which the First Presbyterian team traveled.
Short-term mission trips lasting between one week and one month have exploded in popularity over the past two decades. Now, more than 1 million Americans take short-term trips each year at a cost of $1 billion, according to statistics from Evangelical Missions Quarterly, a trade magazine for missionaries.
Short-term trips were once test runs for young people considering a lifetime of missionary or humanitarian work in foreign countries.
Now, youth leaders say the trips help teens appreciate what they have at home.
Instead of working through a large mission organization, many churches are planning their trips themselves.
The result is that many teenagers who aren’t serious about humanitarian and missionary work have near-unfettered access to trips, often on the dime of their families and their churches, said Lane Powell, spokeswoman for Operation Mobilization, a mission organization with dozens of offices around the world.
“(Trips) shouldn’t be for people who are just looking for a way to get to another country,” she said. “We have a pretty healthy application process that not just the average tourist would press on with. We require pastoral recommendations.”
Several local youth leaders said they didn’t require much of the participants other than attendance at pre-trip meetings.
Cooper said she hasn’t thought about how the teenagers in her group might continue to help the village they visited in Mexico in the future.
Experts say a widespread lack of planning for the return-end of trips has whittled away at their effectiveness.
“If we’re going to spend $30,000 to put a $2,000 roof on a building, then there has to be another reason for the trip,” said Kurt Ver Beek, professor of sociology at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich.
In a study released last year, Ver Beek examined American youth groups that traveled to Honduras to build homes for people who had lost everything in Hurricane Mitch in 1998.
He found that the Honduran families, in the years after their homes were rebuilt, were no more or less happy with their homes than families with homes built by local workers.
He also found that most Americans who took the trips were not giving to aid organizations, praying or volunteering any more in the years after the trip than before the trip.
Trips have lasting impact only if the American churches have a structure in place that helps participants make a long-term commitment to charitable giving and volunteering.
“I have a friend who went to speak at a missions conference, and the first question he asked was, ‘Who wants their house to be built by a 15-year-old?’” Ver Beek said.
Pamela Bickford is a music teacher at Serene Lake Elementary School in Edmonds.
She doesn’t have any experience in animal husbandry, but two years ago she taught a class on raising rabbits to a group of Mayan villagers.
The village is near a Mexican church that has been sponsored by North Creek Presbyterian Church in Mill Creek for the past 15 years.
North Creek has built long-term relationships with the villagers, she said. The church purchased the rabbits for the village.
“This is about coming alongside people and letting them know that they’re cared for, that they’re loved,” she said.
Many Americans who embark on mission trips have an over-inflated sense of importance, said Noel Becchetti, president of Center for Student Missions, a short-term mission organization.
“We try to say, in a gentle way, ‘Look, you’re not going to change this city in a week, so let’s figure out why you’re really here,’” he said.
Groups should work with existing organizations and do what they’re asked, he said.
“People tend to sort of cruise in and say ‘We’re Americans, we’ll do it our way,’” he said.
American churches should partner with churches in other countries if they want to make a lasting impact, said David Greenlee, youth minister at the Edmonds/Lynnwood Lutheran Parish.
“You shouldn’t just come into an area and work regardless of what the local churches are doing,” he said. “We need to come as partners rather than as rich Americans.”
Many churches in foreign countries are active and thriving, Greenlee said.
“We can learn from them,” he said. “It’s offensive to think that these people in Mexico and other places have nothing to teach us.”
Nineteen teenagers from Greenlee’s parish left Thursday for Santa Maria, Calif., to work with existing churches to hold a day camp for Spanish-speaking children.
Last year, Greenlee’s parish helped pay for a group from Mexico to travel to Snohomish County to help with summer programs here instead of sending American teens there.
“Trips have an impact when they are part of an overall program that is year-round in the host church,” Greenlee said. “Training should be year-round, and not just, we’re going somewhere, then we come back and it’s done.”
A dozen teenagers, ranging in age from 13 to 17, from The Rock Church in Monroe returned from a two-week trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, last month.
They re-roofed and painted a school that serves children who work in a nearby dump.
“I think we made an impact,” said Shannon Walden, 13, of Snohomish. “The school is painted and looks nice in the middle of a city that’s surrounded by poverty.”
Walden’s sense of satisfaction is worth the money spent on the team’s trip, The Rock youth pastor Travis Warren said.
“You may be able to hire somebody down there to do it in less time for less money, but the rippling effect of what you’re instilling in these students, that they know they’ve helped others, that’s priceless,” he said.
Reporter Krista J. Kapralos: 425-339-3422 or kkapralos@ heraldnet.com.
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