re: Church mission trips to Central America.

I think more people need to see just how good we have it here in comparison to some other countries.

I had a coworker who just went on a mission trip to Guatemala. She went down to work with special needs students (she's an ECE assistant here) at a camp they had for about two weeks. Said it was one of the best experiences she had in her life. And feels like it helped honed her teaching methods by dealing with kids in a different culture and working with other special education teachers. While they were there they also built some water purification systems for the village and helped in the construction of a kind of community center/health clinic for them. So the village definitely benefitted from their experience there.

So yeah, I gotta disagree. I'd love to at some point travel to an area where some of the kids I work with are from just to get a feel for their culture/way of life.