The Transit Lounge - Time to Look outside our backyard

http://www.thetransitlounge.com.au/international/
its_time_to_look_outside_our_backyard


The Uniting Church has launched an e-magazine, Transit Lounge, with heaps of online articles. It's intended for travellers in general and hopes to reach a wide reading audience. One of the articles in the February edition is 'It's time to look outside our backyard', and features brief interviews with Jeff and Jan Hudson - Volunteers in Mission in Thailand, and Jason Bray, who recently led a short term exposure trip to the Philippines. Here's some of the article. The link is at the top if you want to check out the full article, or other stories in The Transit Lounge.

For Jason Bray, a 34 year old from Brisbane, overseas travel has allowed him to gain an appreciation of how the majority of the world’s population lives.“So many young Aussies are hot-footing it over to London for a year, but that represents how the minority of the world’s population lives – we really need to see how the majority of people live to get a real worldview.“We in the west live in a bubble of ignorance; when we choose only to explore those [western] places we perpetuate that bubble.”
Jason helped lead a Short Term Exposure Trip to Manilla for three weeks just after Christmas. As the name suggests, these trips are not work parties but open people’s minds to another reality that holidaying can only hope to touch on.“We hoped that by going, we’d see some sort of reaction from those who went, to get them to engage in some sort of mission in response to what they had seen, whether that be overseas or in their own backyard.”In a country where human rights abuses are still common, and one third of the population live below the poverty, the group was confronted with some tough situations.Like the visit to Smoky Mountain — a garbage dump in Manilla where 30,000 people live and work and where toxic fires can often be seen burning in the distance. Or being in the blue light district hearing stories of young girls who’d been forced into prostitution to feed their families — at a bar owned and operated by an Australian. “I asked people at the end of the day, when we got back to our air conditioned hotel rooms in a state of shock, if they would rather be a prostitute like some of the people in Manilla suffering abject poverty or work on Smokey Mountain. Faced with such a bleak choice, most of them said they would rather be a prostitute.”
It’s this sense of context that churches and non-governmentorganisations (NGOs) hope to foster through the many overseas mission and exposure trips they facilitate.
These trips are as much about debunking myths and challenging the prior understandings of participants as they are about assisting people in the country you are traveling to. After all Jesus spent much of his time inviting those who would listen to step outside their boundaries.
Overseas Mission and exposure trips are a perfect way for people to step outside their own personal boundaries and take a much broader view of the world.

For information on these short term exposure trips and other volunteer opportunities, contact Kathy Periera, People in Mission Coordinator, kathyp@nat.uca.org.au, 02 8267 4230.