Wild and Wonderful: Tourism, Faith, and Communities

By Stan L. LeQuire, Chantelle du Plessis and Scott Sabin

After logging thousands of miles in planes, jeeps, dugout canoes, pickup trucks, bicycles, and on foot, LeQuire and du Plessis offer insights into how Christians around the world are using tourism to develop their villages while caring for both creation and culture. Based on a multi-year research project, this book showcases innovative projects that Christian villagers and faith-based organizations are engaging to alleviate poverty through business ventures. Through a unique mix of travelogue and theological reflection, this book concludes with a challenge to the status quo of current short-term mission practice and provides thoughtful alternatives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Nov 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781630870799

Stan L. LeQuire

Stan L. LeQuire teaches sustainable development in Eastern University's School of Leadership and Development. LeQuire is a past director of the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) and has published an anthology of sermons on creation care called The Best Preaching on Earth.

Book preview

Foreword

As we stepped out of the small boat and onto the beach, my wife Nancy and I could hardly believe where we were. No other people were around except for our guide. In the midst of the stunningly clear turquoise waters of the largest lagoon in the world, we had our own private island.

The guide, a young Solomon Islander, showed us to our room, a grass house that was built on pilings over the water, one of three on the island. The other two stood empty. In the bedroom, an immaculate bed was tastefully adorned with flowers under a mosquito net canopy.

More flowers and a thermos with hot water for tea sat on a table on the deck, which looked out on a lagoon and the forest, a vista that showed no evidence of having ever been touched by another human. Under our porch, a multi-colored stingray raised clouds of white sand as it swam along the bottom.

The shower and toilet were a hundred feet away, down a raked sand pathway. Hot water was brought in buckets from the village across the lagoon.

I had seen pictures of places like this in catalogues advertising high-end resorts, and all-inclusive vacations, but this wasn’t one of those. Rather, it was a community-run project in the Solomon Islands, and other than the cost of getting to this part of the world it was very affordable.

After we had settled in, the resort manager from the nearby village visited to see how we were getting along. Almost casually, he asked me if I wanted to see their biodiversity plan. I was intrigued, beginning to sense that this place was something extraordinary. As I complimented him on how welcome they had made us feel, he looked grateful and told me that he didn’t always get that response. One woman had even complained that there was no television. I have never seen a television, he told me, as an afterthought.

A little research let me know the community had set up this venture with the help of the World Wildlife Fund, but now they ran it on their own. It was an alternative to selling logging concessions to foreign companies, as many other communities had been persuaded to do—leaving their hills bare and their villages still destitute. Unlike many places, in the Solomon Islands local communities own most of the land. However, for subsistence farmers and fishermen who have increasing contact with the affluence of the West, the temptation to sell their forests and reefs to buy items such as outboard motors and fiberglass canoes can be overwhelming.

Many of the villagers participated in running the resort, bringing meals over in boats, and offering cultural opportunities such as village tours, and traditional dancing. The night the dancers came over, Nancy and I were entertained by a dozen of the teenagers, wearing grass skirts and matching T-shirts that said, Shine Jesus, Shine—a reminder of the strong evangelical faith of most of the islanders. (I remember reading a discussion in the newspaper about whether it was appropriate for a national airline pilot to pray with the passengers before a flight. The consensus seemed to be that it was.)

While some might decry the loss of cultural purity represented by those shirts, I had just come from another island where the testimony to their Christian faith is one I won’t soon forget. A couple of young men took me across the lagoon to the foot of a tiny volcano. There, hidden in the forest, were several large piles of human skulls. One man explained what they were: skulls collected on headhunting raids. These are from Kolombangarra, and these over here are from Ranongga, he pointed, naming several of the nearby islands. Then after a pause he said softly, but now we have Jesus.

We stayed at the resort for several days with one of the small dugout canoes at our disposal. The visit was one of the most memorable parts of that trip—a five-month backpacking trek around the world—and I consider Vanua Rapita to be one of the most memorable places we have ever stayed. (You can find information on this site in Appendix A).

However, in the too many years that have passed since that idyllic stay, I have often thought about Michi, the village that operated the resort, and wondered how they were doing with this brave project. It cannot have been an easy road. Communication with booking agents and potential visitors is difficult, and there are no slick advertisements or fancy public relations campaigns. Ethnic conflict among islanders in other parts of the country, which came to a head in the early 2000s, must have cut deeply into an already meager stream of tourists. And the global recession certainly hasn’t helped. That project, like so many others, is dependent on a reliable supply of visitors willing to pay and learn.

In our work at Plant With Purpose, we are often hesitant to leave a community with such a tenuous lifeline, preferring instead to focus on local food security, local markets, and regional opportunities, before connecting them with possibly more lucrative, but certainly more fickle, external opportunities. Yet more and more I am seeing a role for ecotourism as a viable option for communities, giving an incentive to celebrate the good in the local culture and an incentive to protect and sustainably use the resources that a community manages. There was something truly remarkable about the resort manager at Rapita offering to share their biodiversity plan.

I have also seen, participated in, and even led many short-term mission trips. It is hard to get church members interested in those trips unless they believe they are going to be doing something substantial—building something or painting something. Too many people expect to change the world during a weeklong vacation. Frequently, these trips benefit the visitors, but may not benefit the communities they have come to help. It may even cause harm.

When a trip is poorly executed, it can create dependency and demoralize local people who feel inadequate to do things for themselves. The implicit message of many trips is that the local people need outsiders because they themselves lack the necessary talents to run their own lives. But after years of running construction-focused trips, we changed up that dynamic, with local people teaching the visitors what they know about sustainable agriculture or appropriate technology. Now community members can walk away from the encounter knowing they too have something valuable to contribute—something worth sharing. That has had a far more profound effect on the village than the construction of any building. In a well-run trip, the most important thing we have managed to accomplish has been to encourage and validate the work of the local people. Often it has lent energy to the community long after the group has left.

Effective community-based tourism can have the same effect, because communities are able to offer something and to be paid for their effort. They are treated as people of value, with inherent talents, rather than being the recipients of handouts. They can be proud of their culture rather than made to feel ashamed of it. It is an opportunity to recognize the dignity and capability of the local people. Supporting a Christian community involved in a tourism project, while being a witness to those we meet and interact with in our travels, can often be more effective than poorly considered short-term mission trips.

Of course there are pitfalls in community-based tourism, as is the case in anything else. I have visited places where negative aspects of culture have been cultivated and accentuated, because they appealed to tourists’ tastes for the bizarre or morbid. There are other places where the eco in ecotourism is little more than branding. More than once I have seen local communities, entranced by the idea of ecotourism, but lacking the external perspective to make it work for visitors with different cultural expectations. For example, I remember walking through the forest on the way back from a remote limestone cave. It had been a marvelous adventure. As we made our way through the bush, the local guide told me of his dream to pave the whole route, put concrete steps into the cave and install handrails and lighting. From my perspective it would have destroyed all the charm that site possessed. Finally, as in the case of Rapita, tourists can provide a fickle and inconsistent market.

In the ensuing chapters, Stan LeQuire and Chantelle du Plessis explore these issues and more. They give us insight on how to do ecotourism right, and how, when properly done, it can bring glory to God through the stewarding of creation and the witness of the community. Furthermore, the authors give us some wonderful examples of places where it is being done well.

After reading this book, I can hardly wait to get packing.

Scott Sabin

Executive Director

Plant with Purpose

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we humbly acknowledge the many indigenous workers all around the world who have labored hard to launch these tourist sites. Without their efforts, this book would not exist. In no way do we want this book to detract from or to consume heedlessly the fruits of their labors. These servants include, but are not limited to: Juan Pablo Morales, Osvaldo Mungia, Gustavo Ramos, Juan Ramirez, Daryl Bosu, and Seth Appiah-Kubi. While not particularly indigenous, we also thank Jim Yost, Colin Jackson, and many others.

From Stan LeQuire: I want to thank the faculty, staff and students of Eastern University’s School of Leadership and Development who encouraged my research and writing. I am grateful for my many graduate assistants over the ten years of research that go into this book without whom this book would never exist: Phil Steiner, Nate Howard, Jason Drummond, Jennifer Brady Hall, Shannon Brisco, Chamba Qiangbaciren, Timothy Cramer, Nathaniel Milton, Melissa Yates, Deke Bowman, Bianca Flokstra, Katie Van Gilder Alesi, Jennifer Lambert, Kristen Gibbs, and Christina Voigt. Thank you, all; I miss your presence in the office. In addition, I want to thank several colleagues who have encouraged and supported me along the way: Dr. David Bronkema, Dr. Beth Birmingham, Scott Sabin, Dr. Tom Ridington, Elizabeth Israel, Nate Brown, Danny Bismark-Petit, Anthony Califano, Tim Spect, Tim Hoiland, and Kate