Craig Martin
Producer/host
The world of missions, philanthropy and global charity is a mélange of the quirky and sometimes inexplicable. As we say in The Good Road, “Charity is a messy business.”
With our The Good Road series we have been just as moved by the stories of people helping in a ghetto in Alabama as we have been in slums of Kenya.
As an American living the “American dream,” I hope and pray that we never lose our empathy for those in our world who suffer much more than we do.
The oddities of trying to have a good conversation with someone who doesn’t speak your language have some universal similarities. You think if you just speak louder and more slowly, the other party will soon understand what you are saying.
I found that I suffered a “messiah complex,” acting as if I was there to somehow save the day when in reality I was all too often in need of being saved.
He was unwilling to be directly connected with us on our crossing from Thailand into Laos. He was a nice guy and we were happy to work with him, but he had too much to risk crossing the border with a media crew.
To break the tension, I joked that we were in bad shape if we were excited about being on the right road to the Syrian border, of all places.
IIdid something I had never done before. I turned the video camera on myself and said a few last words of love and appreciation for my wife, Erika. In that moment, I really didn’t know if we would make it.