Posted: 8th June 2020
Embarking on a mission trip is about more than providing a service to others. A deepened faith, meaningful servitude, a fuller understanding of real-world challenges, and finding ways to help others to faith are some of the underlying reasons many of us choose to take this opportunity.
But you may have been wondering exactly what a mission trip is, and what you can expect to do when you embark on this journey. Let’s have a closer look at the ways you can expect to make a difference on your upcoming mission trip.
Remember, each mission trip serves its own unique purpose and will have activities planned out beforehand; these are some useful ways to make the most out of every trip.
Mission trips that focus on community outreach can take various forms. Our international charity partnerships help us gain an insight into the communities we visit, so that we can best help to meet their needs. This can be anything from helping villages suffering the aftereffects of natural disasters through to communities in dire need of medical infrastructure. From this grass-roots level understanding, we can shape our trip objectives to help us achieve meaningful work with tangible effects.
On these trips, you can share your specialist knowledge with a community in need and widen your own perspective. Medical and healthcare, teaching, and IT skills are some of the core focus areas on our specialist mission trips. By drawing on your niche skillset and experience, we can create and implement much needed infrastructure, systems and processes vital for the development of disadvantaged communities. Not only will your specialist input help to create these foundations, but they also help to create an environment to foster growth and development of the younger generations within those communities, helping them find a way out of the poverty cycle and further uplift their households.
Perhaps the most popular type of mission trip, on these trips our goal is to build communities – physically and metaphorically – from the ground up. You can find great examples of the impact this has had in our past projects, where we built new classrooms for Zambian communities and as well as a community centre in Campo Largo, Brazil.
Building mission trips are far more than brick and mortar projects; while working to help build physical frameworks, our volunteers gain an understanding of other issues that are also having a big impact on the community. Our Sierra Leone trip is one such example, where the Porridge Fund has undertaken the task of providing school lunches. The knock-on effects this project has achieved are astounding, with an almost immediate improvement in the children’s exam results. In 2018, 15 children passed with a Division One score where in previous years this has typically been achieved by just two or three children. This has lifted Kumi Bazaar School to the top of the performance table in Kumi District – all as a result of hands-on understanding and support of the real-life issues that we were able to change.
Women, children, and the elderly are some of the most vulnerable members of the communities we visit. By focusing our mission trips on uplifting and safeguarding the youngest members of these communities, we’re helping to alleviate some of the turmoil they face each day and providing a clear path forward for children and teenagers. We set out to alleviate some common problems these groups face. Project 25Zero focuses on assisting Ugandan girls who miss up to a quarter of their education due to their periods, and Rewired Africa aims to educate and promote the use of computers in rural villages.
As you can see, mission trips can take a variety of forms, and each one is unique because of the project scope and teams we engage. There are so many ways to get involved, why not get in touch with us today to find out more or have a look through our impact stories to see how much change we’ve already made.
