Reggie Quimby thought he and his fellow missions team members were safe.
In the company of local guides and a caravan of vehicles they traveled at night on a rural road in Guatemala. While there was some risk involved with this particular road after sunset, Quimby believed the odds of something bad happening were too small.
However, a group of bandits with AK-47s blocked their path with rocks, forced them to pull over and robbed them. No one was harmed that night several years ago. But Quimby, global missions director for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM), was reminded that a crime can happen when it’s least expected.
“People get comfortable and let their guard down,” he said. “We had been there. We had traveled on these roads. [We thought] if we traveled together that risk would go away. Well obviously it did not.”
The SBOM and other Baptist organizations are continuing to assess the growing risks involved with overseas travel.
Many of them have turned to an organization based in Pinehurst, Idaho, called Fort Sherman Academy. Its president, David Dose, is a former Department of Defense consultant and instructor who has helped train government, corporate and faith-based groups how to handle travel risks for the past 17 years. The group is one of the largest — if not the largest — providers in the United States of travel security courses, crime survival training and crisis management.
Dose and his team have interviewed numerous survivors of overseas crime looking for ways these situations could have been avoided. Among those survivors is Gracia Burnham. She and her husband Martin, who were missionaries to the Philippines, were taken hostage by Muslim extremists in 2001 and held in captivity for more than a year before Gracia was rescued. Martin lost his life when he got caught in the crossfire of a gun battle that broke out during the rescue.
Seeing opportunities
“During my time in this work the Burnham case particularly touched me and I’ve been privileged to work with Gracia some since,” Dose said. “I saw opportunities where probably using existing knowledge we could have helped some people avoid, survive or better survive and encourage folks.”
Fort Sherman currently works with about 200 clients. Included in that list is the Southern Baptist International Mission Board, nine Baptist state conventions and numerous churches. The group works with organizations from other denominations as well.
Fort Sherman has a team of about 50 full-time, part-time and contract workers and its headquarters also include a 40-acre guest facility.
Helping better equip faith-based groups for overseas ministry is what motivated Dose and his wife, Elizabeth, to start Fort Sherman.
“My wife and I made the decision that probably a lot of missionaries and their families have made — to throw everything in the basket. We started our own company with a major focus on faith-based [groups]. I find enjoyment in that audience. I find purpose in their purpose and so we did like everybody else [with] our finances and future plans and cashed those things in and started this little organization.”
And the “little” organization has grown. Since it began more than 10 years ago Fort Sherman has trained about 42,000 long- and short-term missions workers as well as corporate and humanitarian workers.
Fort Sherman specializes in providing different levels of training — including web-based training — on how to handle various types of crisis situations overseas. It also provides a 24-hour service for clients to call if they need assistance.
Some of those situations may include:
- What to do if someone on a missions team gets sick overseas, needs immediate medical care and is unable to travel back to the United States.
- Calling for help if you or a team member is robbed and your wallet and passport have been taken.
- What to do if an unexpected natural disaster hits the area you’re traveling in and derails travel back to the United States for several days.
- How to handle a team member being detained by an overseas government for several days.
Dose said an “upsurge” of interest is developing among faith-based groups as evangelical groups and organizations send more teams into high-risk areas.
“This is just one more tool to focus on the basics of avoiding crime, surviving crime, being organized in advance for avoiding those things and even having a crisis plan in place if something goes wrong — whether a volcano interrupts travel or somebody stops me at a border,” Dose said.
Dose said travelers need to realize finding a “safe place” to travel is becoming increasingly difficult.
Unexpected challenges
“I’ll get the guy who says, ‘Oh we don’t have a problem. We go to the same place every year,’” said Dose, noting he read a U.S. State Department report showing that crime has increased by nearly 15 percent worldwide. “Yeah but if crime is going up every year and you’re doing the same thing you always did, eventually someone might fall victim. We’re trying to prep them for that.”
And sometimes unexpected challenges can arise before a missions team even arrives at their destination.
As airport authorities continue to crack down on a variety of criminal activity — drug and sex trafficking, terrorism — more missions teams are being detained in airports everywhere, Dose said.
Teams often don’t plan ahead for handling unexpected questions in an airport, he said. Travelers need to be able to better articulate why they are traveling to a country and what they plan to do while they are there.
“They throw out the good old ‘I’m just an American tourist’ and that doesn’t work anymore,” he said. “Winging it doesn’t help because security has changed.”
Dose said those types of mistakes can get expensive if a team member is detained. In some situations organizations can spend anywhere from $10,000 to more than $50,000 in fees and legal expenses triggered by issues with overseas governments.
“I’ve seen up to $100,000 in a month,” Dose said. “That’s a lot of money that would have gone to next year’s missions trip.”
Quimby said stewardship was a major part of the decision for the SBOM to develop an ongoing partnership with Fort Sherman. He described the training they’ve received in developing crisis management strategies as a way of “protecting ministry, protecting our future ministry and helping our churches to protect their ministry.”
“We’re seeing that if we do the training and we invest up front, then we may not have to pay those big expenses because we have been trying to do things correctly,” he said.
Ken Rhodes, director of missions mobilization for the Mississippi Baptist Convention, said they require missions teams and personnel who work with them to go through at least a basic level of training from Fort Sherman — which can involve an eight-hour course.
“In Mississippi we are really pressing the boundaries to send people to some of the harder places to get to in the world,” Rhodes said, noting they have trained about 2,000 people.
In addition to the general risks involved with overseas travel, Rhodes said there also are liability issues to consider. Organizations should be prepared to resolve conflicts that could surface between them and the family members of those involved in an unexpected crisis, he said.
“We send husbands of unbelieving wives, we send students whose parents are unbelievers and they do not understand what is happening,” Rhodes said. “So I think that is a huge liability when you’re sending family members who are from families who are not supportive and may not even be believers.”
More and more Baptist colleges and universities also are working with Fort Sherman to train students planning to study abroad or participate in missions trips.
Cynthia Jayne, associate provost for intercultural and international studies at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., noted, “We decided that it really didn’t matter where students were going. [Students] had the potential to get themselves into really serious difficulties if they didn’t understand some of the basic things.”
The university sends about 250 to 300 students overseas annually for academic programs and about 200 to 300 overseas for missions projects.
Crisis management on campus
Jayne said the university continues to push its leadership to be more prepared when working with students overseas.
The training also has helped them prepare to better handle potential crisis situations on campus. In February 2014 a Union University student was charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of another student on its campus in Jackson.
“It raised a lot of other questions for us about preparing our students to deal with many kinds of life situations,” Jayne said.
The campus now is working with Fort Sherman to provide online training to freshmen this year, Jayne said.
“Ultimately our goal is to have every student have that basic online training,” Jayne said. “You can fence in. You can lock the gates. You can do all of those things but if the students themselves don’t understand how to protect themselves, it isn’t going to help.”
(BP)
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