What is This?

unreached people group LTE.

Facilitation fail.

There’s a right and a wrong way to do it… I really don’t think that this is the fault of leadership, but some power-trippin’ GIs.

Power-Trippin GI’s the H.A. put in leadership and doesn’t watch or hold accountable for what they do.
lol. This actually doesn’t surprise me at all. I dont even feel bad for the girl. haha. She was probably loving it in the moment honestly. These situations were so fake and just made you think.
Most of the time after I would leave being in a situation like that I would be just kinda confused, but I did think a lot about what they were saying.
Was this NOT normal R.A.?!?!?! This was like, every LTE, Roads, A lot of times this was core, or a late night with the people you worked with. haha.
This is so normal at the H.A.!

this was the unreached people group LTE…from my year. as i recall, this girl was a “native” that had converted to christianity via the “missionaries” to her tribe, and it looks like she got caught by the oppressive government [the GI’s and staff members] and stuck in the showerhouses [aka “prison”] for interrogation. I think it was supposed to allow us to feel persecution, or something like that. I hated this LTE, and then felt guilty for saying so, because everyone i talked to would tell glorious stories about how much it had changed their lives. Also twisted? the more glorious your stories were about the “persecution” you endured at the hands of the GI’s, the more holy you were, and lifted up as examples to the rest of the internship.

anonymous is right; although pretty extreme, forms of this were way common in most of the LTE’s, roads, and over-zealous CA’s in core time. the more you endured, the holier you were…and the stories quickly spread throughout the internship.

yeah, there’s a government during UPG…i was a missionary, and first you had to come up with some kind of excuse to tell the government when you went through “customs”–but they could still search your bags and hold you over, and blah blah. we weren’t allowed to bring in bibles unless you hid them, that kind of stuff. apparently the country we were heading into was closed, or what have you. so in the process of trying to figure out the language/evangelize/etc. the government [staff & GI’s] would come around and interrogate both the missionaries and the tribal people to find out if any illegal proselytizing was going on–and if they thought there was, they’d cart you off to “jail” [the showerhouses] and persecute you. sometimes the tribal people would sell the missionaries out to the government so that we’d get carted away, sometimes they would send you there regardless. it could be a rumor, but i think i heard my year that they actually broke someone down bad enough that he spat on a cross in the dirt, but it could just be a TM rumor.
i actually think they gave up the UPG for the “world awareness” LTE–which was based solely on the concept of persecution and defending your faith in a closed country–so essentially what the UPG had become, without the missionary/tribe deal.

at least in the UPG, the “persecution” consisted of stuff like this–you’d find yourself in a shower stall doing wall-sits and holding a brick over your head, and they’d interrogate you hardcore using apologetics; basically trying to get you to state why you believe what you do, etc. i know of one girl they took into a back room and poured cold water on over and over again to see if she’d break…but again, at the time those were the glory stories–the harder they pushed you, the more righteous you felt, because aren’t real people out there getting it WAY worse than we were? and if we could learn to stand now…

…these are the extremes though. a lot of core meetings that you’d hear about were hugely emotional and dramatic–CA’s taking their boys into the back 40 to climb the walls of the pit and symbolize something or other; CA’s digging graves in the back 40 and making you stand in them to symbolize dying to yourself and whatnot…they weren’t as extreme as the UPG’s, but the more dramatic and symbolic the core meeting, the better it was [and the better stories you had the next day].

i really don’t know about your last question, RA–i was in a GI program that didn’t really participate in the LTE’s, so it was kind of a moot point for me and my friends, but i did hear people talking about wanting to facilitate, etc. there were the people who talked about how it was harder to facilitate than actually participate [i.e. ESOAL], but i was oblivious to most of that my GI year.

This is just insane. Seriously. Where in the bible does it ever say to hold mock persecutions? This smacks of masochism. It’s just bizarre.

So just a few things #1- I’m so upset about this video. It’s labeled as “Torture” when it wasn’t torture at all. Honestly, I promise you, there was no intern hurt in the making of this video physically or emotionally (though the potential for spiritual abuse is RAMPANT.) So all the other video’s that pop up as related are “woman tortured by the taliban” and the like. Which just upsets me. Does that upset anyone else? Interns think they are doing this really great thing and they even post it on YouTube, it just looks like they are mocking the world to me.
ugh. It makes me kinda sick. Really.
#2- I do have to say I did learn a lot from my UPG. I liked the government. I was a missionary, so it added a few heightened elements to it. It was probably my fave. LTE. I really liked being interrogated by the G.I.’s. and I liked being given the chance to figure out how to share my faith. It was at my UPG that I really got a heart for missions.
#3- The only hurtful thing about the interrogations from the G.I’s at E.S.O.A.L. or UPG or random core’s, was that it was so intense but there was no love. Like, they would prove their point to you, and you’d get it normally (It wasn’t often that I would leave a situation without thinking on it.) but in the long run what was the point with out love? I didn’t know those G.I.’s and it felt like they really didn’t care about me at all, just that they were so excited they got to yell at someone.
Sadly.. I ended up being just that, one of those G.I.’s.
oh and #4- Most G.I.’s do not stay for the soul perpose of facilitating LTE’s. though that is a big excitement for them. G.I.’s stay because Mr. Hasz tells them to.
He was on a pretty big kick when I was there a few years ago about, “Don’t leave unless you KNOW God is calling you to. He brought you here, and if He doesn’t direct you elsewhere, then He wants you to stay…”
oh I’m SO GLAD I’m not at the H.A. anymore!!!!

And now I will be unladylike because my immediate response to this is WTF?

In a psych class in college we learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment where students were set up as guards and prisoners. The study had to be called off after 6 days because the guards got sadistic. That made me think of my experiences at Teen Mania. You can read more about it www.prisonexp.org

The UPG LTE is about learning to share your faith with differant cultures and trying not to get caught by the goverment who is suppressing the truth. Anyway if you do not learn anything in this LTE it’s still lots of fun dressing up as tribal peaople or being missionaries trying to learn the language and customs of the tribe.

No, R.A. SHE IS. promise. lol. This is such a dumb video to put up on utube. I garentee it was put up out of pride of having gone through it. I’m only telling you for your own benifit, so you know, she is not being “Tortured” at all. and is loving it. I mean, now that she is out she might realize how stupid it all is. but she was not hurt at all.
in my UPG I got placed in the back of a truck being taken to “Jail” for sharing my faith then taken at -paintball- gun point and told what a worthless Christian I was.
I prentended to cry because I was trying to place myself in a missionaries shoes.
Reality- I worked with the G.I. and my sister core adviser was driving the truck, his gun probably didn’t have any paintballs in it, and I was being taken to the girls shower house. and I knew it.

I was pretty sure the paintball gun being pointed at me didn’t really have any paintballs in it either…till I was shot in the back for running away when that G.I. told me to. BS

Getting off topic a little. I know I sound like your mom right now, but paintball guns are serious business. To the best of my knowledge some states will charge you with illegal possession of a firearm (or some similar offense) if you have one in your car. I don’t remember if they were used during my year there. Regardless though, the fact that they were there and fired at folks without proper protection is kind of ridiculous to me.
“Youre gonna shoot your eye out with that thing”

i guess what I’m trying to say is that in hindsight I think its pretty irresponsible of the leadership to even allow the paintball guns

Anonymous that made all the points above – Point 4 is absolutely correct. I remember during my intern year (2 years ago!) that we were told to stay at the HA for a GI year unless God was calling us to leave. But then to stay as a GI you had to go down the roads….which was confusing, because if you didn’t feel that God was telling you to leave, then why would you need the roads to be allowed to stay? Hmm…

I was never in ESOAL, and left before the LTEs after the Fall Fasting LTE, but i’ve heard enough stories about them! My intern year the guys did both the UPG AND World Awareness.
I DO remember interns being made to eat tripe during ESOAL, and also made to eat oatmeal that had various food colorings and salt in it, that had been stored in a trash can!

And I saw first hand the GIs taking aim and shooting at interns during ESOAL.

This sort of behavior was/is common during all of the RPG (World Awareness, UPG, ESOAL, even Roads) LTEs I experienced at TM (as an UG, GI,& Staff). This one in particular is UPG.