Katherine was nice enough to share her story about her experiences with Global Expeditions.
Trigger Warning: The last bullet point does involve sexual assault.
Although I didn’t attend the Honor Academy, I participated in four Global Expeditions (GE) mission trips as a teenager: 2 months in Panama (age 13), 1 month in China (age 15), 1 month in Thailand (age 16) and 2 weeks in Mexico (age 18). As a young, vulnerable teenager, I got sucked into GE through Acquire the Fire, and I had some genuinely beautiful encounters with God and people around the world during these trips. However, after two decades of working through the resulting symptoms of complex PTSD and re-reading my detailed diary entries from those trips, I have a very different view of my time with Teen Mania.
Global Expeditions wasn’t your typical summer mission trip where a church youth group heads down to Mexico for Spring Break to do community service. Minors like myself were sent overseas without their parents or other responsible adults present to protect them or care for their basic needs. We didn’t have cell phones or any way to easily reach our parents from many of these remote locations, so our care was entirely in the hands of our mission trip leaders, who were often traumatized Honor Academy graduates who were barely adults themselves. We were treated as expendable soldiers on the battlefield, and the thousands of dollars we fundraised weren’t going towards our protection.
Here’s a list of the “highlights reel” of the most traumatic incidents I endured as a child/teen on GE mission trips:
- To get to our remote village in Panama, we had to ride in canoes for hours down a river, sometimes in miserable heat or in pouring rain. We weren’t allowed to complain because it was unChristian to do so, even when we were drenched in freezing cold rain and peeing into the water in the base of our canoe just to keep our feet warm and quell our shivering.
- In Thailand, we were required to do ministry near the red light district in Chiang Mai even though our team consisted primarily of teenage girls. I remember feeling incredibly uncomfortable walking down streets where old (mostly white) men were groping underage Thai female escorts. I felt so sorry for those young women and incredibly powerless to protect them or ourselves from the many exploitative older men around us who were there for sex tourism.
- In China, our team was forced to illegally smuggle Bibles across the border from Hong Kong into mainland China. We were not given a choice in the matter and were told it was an honor to risk our safety to bring the good news to unreached people. We could have been imprisoned if caught, and there was no way to discreetly sneak hundreds of Bibles in our twenty-something suitcases. I had around 10-20 Bibles stuffed into my one suitcase, making it incredibly heavy. If the border security guard had unzipped my suitcase, they would have immediately discovered the Bibles. Thankfully we didn’t get caught, but our leaders then proceeded to force us to lug our Bible-laden suitcases for over a mile without complaint. I got blisters on my hands and the handles on my suitcase eventually ripped off under the strain, forcing me to lug a ripped suitcase for the remainder of the trek.
- In Panama, we were fed a rotation of only 3 meals on repeat for lunches and dinners in the village: rice + spam, rice + sardines, and rice + tuna. I hated fish, so I only ate well on spam nights. I lost over five pounds on some of those jungle weeks, and my teammates and I noticed after one particularly rough week in the jungle that our bras no longer fit us because we’d each lost an entire cup size due to malnutrition.
- In Mexico, we were packed seven girls into one hotel room with only two twin beds and one bathroom despite the $2K+ we had each fundraised. We were routinely berated by our team leaders after doing grueling ministry, and one time we were blamed by them for not saving more people in the audience watching our drama. We were told that it was our fault that they would burn in hell for all eternity because we weren’t taking it seriously enough. One time we were forced to minister inside a male prison. We had to walk through as men cat-called at us and banged on the bars of their cells excited to see a bunch of cute young teenage “gringas.”
- In Panama, I contracted a rare parasite that would come up for air once a day in a new place on my body, leaving a large pink mound with air holes on my leg, arm, belly, etc. One day, I woke up with one of my eyelids swollen completely shut because the parasite had chosen to come up for air on my eyelid that day. My poor 18-year-old leader was freaking out with me and was empathetic but completely in over her head. I think someone from the Teenmania base called us and I remember an ice pack and a first aid kit, but I was never brought to a hospital. I didn’t get properly treated until after the trip was over and I returned to the states.
- In Thailand, our entire team got food poisoning and spent the next 24-hours camping by the bathrooms sprinting there with alternating diarrhea and vomit. We were at least taken to the hospital to get treated, but we were given insufficient time to recover before returning to ministry. I nearly passed out at our ministry site the next day, probably due to dehydration. I also had what sounds like a panic attack based on my journal entry.
- In Panama, we had shared sleeping arrangements in the jungle where our entire co-ed team slept in the same hut. There were no locked doors and there was no separation between the men and women. On at least one night, I was molested by a man in my sleep. Although it was dark and hard to make out who the perpetrator was because my eyes were frozen shut in paralysis (a common trauma “freeze” response), my best guess is that it was one of our team leaders. I had terrifying sleep paralysis demonic nightmares for years to come after this incident, and chalked it all up to “spiritual warfare” until decades later in therapy when I was finally able to identify that the “demon” was on my own team.
That’s all for now. Thanks for providing me a safe space to share my story! In spite of Ron Lucifer, I still love Jesus, but it’s been a harrowing recovery journey, and I’ve landed in a much more liberal, compassionate expression of the Christian faith. If anyone else is reading this who also experienced things that weren’t okay on GE mission trips, know that I believe you and you’re not alone. You’re also not “crazy” for having PTSD symptoms years later because your nervous system was still developing during those formative years on the battlefield. Hopefully we can all find community here and collectively heal our childhood wounds.
