The challenge
Respati A., Jonri K. S, Thaddeus H. E., Y. U. Emu, Ross W., 2023
You are placed in a slum at the edge of a city in the world’s poorest country. The slum has no schools, no Christians, no real business, and very poor health.
- Nobody has any obvious religion, although they have many local spirit beliefs.
- Almost everybody has some kind of sickness, usually malnutrition or malaria. Half of all children die before they turn five years old, and the average life expectancy is 45 years of age.
- There are no schools and nobody can read.
- People live by begging or scrounging from rubbish tips.
- People believe that their lives cannot change, and teach that to their children.
- The local government ignores them and does not want to help. Other nearby communities do not like them and keep them out.
You are sent as a missionary to those people for the next five years.
- You are married and have two children of elementary school age.
- You have financial support for your living costs and personal ministry, but nothing else.
Make a realistic, practical plan of what you will do.
This challenge was intended to refer to a fictitious community, but it closely resembles real communities in several countries.
Almost all the group’s answers were some kind of community development.
Moving into the neighbourhood
- What do you already know?
- Do you already have contacts there?
- Do you already have people who can give you advice? (Expect that some advice will be good and some will not.)
- What do you already know about those people?
- Establish the identity you will present to people.
- Find a house to rent close by and move in.
- Get a helper to help with tasks in the house (usually cooking, cleaning, etc.).
- Visit the neighbors.
- Make friends with nearby people.
- Start learning about the people and keep notes of what you learn. (Expect that their views will probably be very different from those of outsiders.) For example:
- What is their language and culture?
- How do they view themselves? What is their identity?
- What is a typical day for many of them?
- What are the most common kinds of problems in the community?
- Who are their local leaders?
Think about your options
Consider options for feasibility. You might be able to do most of them, but would people be interested? What kinds of things are they good at? Do they have hidden skills?
- Do they have clean water?
- Can you get a team in to dig a well?
- Do you need to use a simple filter, such as a sand filter?
- Are their houses prone to flooding?
- Do they have electricity?
- Would it work to have small, local classes in your home about how to read and write?
- Do you have something for them to read? Children might like children's books. Adults might need to read more utilitarian items.
- Would it work to have a small, local clinic in your house?
- Even if you had no specialist medical or nursing skills, you could still provide first aid, hygiene-related care, basic non-prescription medicines, dietary supplements, and referrals.
- Could you plant a vegetable garden and teach people how to grow vegetables?
- Even if land is scarce, this is fairly easy and will go a long way to solving the nutrition problem. You might find that vegetables are otherwise unavailable during the dry season when many small children die.
- First, ask about their staple diet. They might not want to change their diet too radically.
- Would it be good for them to have more contact with the outside world?
- Communal television is fairly easy and quite common.
- Access to radio is often achievable.
- Could you link people to other kinds of services (e.g. medical, dental, small business loans)?
- Could you give some training in cooking and nutrition, craft, sewing, cleanliness, and hygiene?
- A simple gathering of local mothers is not difficult to run.
- Could some of those skills evolve into marketable skills for employment?
- Are they able to manage money or are they frequently exploited?
- Exploitation is more common if they are illiterate.
- How much do they understand about money? Do they need basic consumer and financial literacy information?
- Could they add value to the things they collect and sell them?
- One group collected a kind of colorful plastic container. Instead of selling them as recyclables, they sewed them together to become shopping bags and sold them.
- Another group recycled tin cans as metal toys.
- What entertainment do they have? Do they have traditional music or dance?