Mission stories serve others, not myself

I've had the opportunity and privilege to go on foreign mission trips each year since 2003. Before my first trip, in 2003, I made a bargain with our publisher at the time that if I wrote some stories about the trip, I could get back some of the vacation days I would otherwise have lost. (At the time, under our old system, that trip would have taken up just about all of my vacation days for the year.)

I worried at the time that the stories would be self-serving. But I tried to be honest about what it was like to live in a dirt-floor shed in Nicaragua for a week, and about my own shortcomings as a first-time missionary.

I got an incredible positive response to that first series of stories, and to the stories I've written about each of my foreign trips since that time. Every year I worry that I'm being self-indulgent or that people will get sick of my ramblings, but not a week goes by during the year without someone commenting on those stories -- or asking me where I plan to go next. (I'll answer that question in a moment.)

This year, when I ran a series about my Costa Rica trip, I got a couple of indirectly negative responses. One of our web site commenters -- a fellow who never has much good to say about anything -- noted a photo of me on horseback and asked, "Which one is the jackass?"

Then, a few weeks later, a woman who was unhappy with the newspaper wrote a letter to the editor (with a copy to our corporate offices) blaming me, personally, for three different burrs under her saddle, two of which had nothing whatsoever to do with me. The one issue in which I had been involved was that I had refused to run, at her suggestion, a negative story about a candidate on Election Day, something no respectable journalistic organization would ever do. In this woman's letter, she made reference to my Costa Rica series and implied that I should be covering the news here at home instead of galavanting around the world.

Except for that first year in Nicaragua, my mission trips are taken on my own hard-earned vacation time, and so they don't take anything away from my coverage of the news here at home.

I still believe, based on the year-round comments I get, that most people like reading the stories. But I want to be sensitive to the issue, and when I think I've overstayed my welcome I'll stop writing them. I certainly don't have to write the stories in order to take the trips. (Actually, I do have to write them. I just don't have to publish them.)

I haven't been as happy with the stories from the past couple of trips because the trips themselves were less productive, and so I didn't feel I had as much good to write about. In Bolivia in 2007, we had some misunderstandings about for whom we were working and what was expected of us. Several other things went wrong as well. Debra Snellen and I spent too much "down time" on that trip simply because there were days when there wasn't that much for us to do.

In 2008, in Costa Rica, Frank Schroer, Megan Siegrist and I were in a much more pleasant and cooperative environment, working with two incredible churches -- but the communities in which we were working just didn't have the same level of poverty I'd seen on previous trips, and at several points during the trip I felt almost guilty for having raised money to go there.

Well, the good news is that I'm making plans to return in July to Kenya, the site of the trips I took in 2004, 2005 and 2006. My heart has been in Kenya ever since I first set foot there -- I even wrote a novel about my experiences -- and I have eagerly waited for a chance to return.

-- John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government and other topics. He is the author of "Soapstone," a novel based on his short-term mission experiences. His home page is lakeneuron.com.