"When Helping Hurts" Teaching in Amuria

This last week I led a training in Amuria using the curriculum I developed during our time in Texas.  It is based on the book "When Helping Hurts" and other books on the poor and community development I have read.  Sara joined for the whole training, as she did not have any farming activities yet this week and she is very familiar with the "When Helping Hurts" material.  She helped me especially in answering questions as groups discussed together.  About half the time was lecture and half group discussion.  The pastors came from all over the district and stayed the nights at the church for the week.  During break times there was a lot of worship through singing as you can see in the videos below.

The training was not without a few challenges.  There were only about 60 pastors that showed up rather than the 100 I expected.  And some pastors missed the first day, and others missed a day in the middle.  English was a big challenge.  My manual needs major editing.  I had tried to use simple English when I wrote it, but now I see that I didn't do near enough simplifying.  And I'm not sure how much was lost in translation during my lecturing, though I have to give a hearty thanks to my pastor friends who labored so long with me in translating.  A last challenge was that the pastors could not afford the financial cost to pay for their food for the whole week, thus the training had to end early on Thursday at noon.  But we still made it through most of the material.  And even with all of those challenges, I would say the training was a big success and people appreciated it very much.  There was also a lot of laughter and fellowship.

Here is a picture below of the portion size at lunches.  (We thought maybe they could have stretched the food out with smaller portion sizes; I ate about half of this after being really hungry, but I believe they were eating much less at other meals of the day.)

The pastors, and some KIDO staff who attended learned very much.  They learned more about Jesus' kingdom, that he came to save not only people, but the whole creation, and cares about the physical needs of people as well as their eternal salvation.  They learned about the emotional, social, and spiritual aspects of poverty.  They learned about how to give more wisely and appropriately.  They learned more more about the grand story of Scripture in general.  They learned about the pride and disdain we and they often have for the poor.  They learned about many of the mistakes missionaries and NGO's have made in places like Uganda.  They learned about how to better plan their missions to the poor, and how to work on development in their communities.  It was a tiring week for us but we definitely feel that the pastors are not returning home the same and God blessed us all during the week!

On this day Sara got so cold her lips started to turn blue.  (It was probably 65-70 degrees or so).  They had to provide her with a blanket that you can see in the photo below.

 Here are some paraphrased testimonies from the pastors about what they learned:
- "Poverty brings shame because you feel powerless."
- "If I look down on the poor, I will have problems with God."
- "I used to give people things without identifying the need, but now I will learn to address the problem."
- "I used to not care about God's creation, but now I see that not caring about it is even a cause of poverty."
- "I am going to sit with my branch church leaders and teach them what we learned in this manual and encourage them to teach their branch churches.  Then we will plan together how to make a change."
- "Now we aren't going to plan programs for the people we are trying to help without talking to them first and building a relationship with them and hearing their ideas."
- "I used to think muzungus are rich and I am poor but now I see that I am rich in other ways that they might not be."



And they gained new hope in their own situations of poverty.  They recognized that we all have resources and skills and there is no one that truly has "nothing."  They went away with new confidence that God could give them ideas to use their own resources well.
- "I thought I was poor, but now I know I am rich."
- "Now I know that I have resources that I can use to cause change.  I am going to utilize the resources I have instead of begging."



I also learned a lot from them.  Much of the training was group discussion, either as a large group, or as small groups.  But maybe most importantly I learned more about what they thought about short term and long term missionaries, and they gave me some food for thought.  Here are some things they said below.  Please keep these things in mind as your churches plan mission trips.
- "Short training can be good but it leaves you without the relationship."
- "A visitor should share something, like speaking at church."
- "We don't like it when visitors surprise us.  We want to plan and prepare for their visit and be prepared for their program."
- "Long term missionaries are much better than short term."
- "It depends on the individual person for whether a long term or short term missionary is a better idea."
- "We want the teacher to stay around to mentor us, and not just leave after a week of training."
- "We don't just want programs, we want to get to know the person over a long time."
- "Some missionaries that came for only a short time, didn't get to know the people, and they ended up causing more division in our area."
- "When a missionary starts trainings but does not finish, and disappears, it really hurts us. Where did they go?"
- "When the missionaries only taught for a week and then went back home, others that had questions about the training ended up blaming us as pastors for the lack of follow-up."
- "Some missionaries in the past came only briefly and made false promises that they never fulfilled."
- "Just observing and sharing on a visit is okay."
- "We really appreciate missionaries that stay a long time and live with the people and learn the language and visit our homes."