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The Harrison Legacy
Ruining
Students' Chances for Normal Lives
By Scott Bessenecker
May 20, 2003
Scott was Dan's assistant for Urbana 87. Scott is currently the Director of InterVarsity's short-term missions program, including the Global Urban Trek.
The
model would eventually ruin hundreds of lives each year. At the time I
wasn't full aware of how radically missions had been rocked when Dan Harrison
returned in 1988 from what was then the Soviet Union, but I knew something
big had happened. I was working as his assistant and had helped to set
up his exploratory trip to Kiev. I remember Dan coming back and saying
that
God's
hand appeared to be in every aspect of the journey.
One piece of evidence
was when his seat assignment got re-arranged and he ended up sitting
next to an American working in the US Consulate who was in charge of
educational programs. Dan had planned to go straight through the Soviet Ministry
of
Education and propose a project where American Christian students come
to the Soviet
Union for a kind of exchange program. Back then that was pretty daring. 
It
would be like proposing the same sort of thing today to the Communist
government of North Korea or to the Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran. But
this seatmate
suggested
that he go directly to the English Department in a university and avoid
the government altogether. Dan took the advice, and short-term projects
as usual,
at least for InterVarsity, was forever ruined.
The English Department of Kiev Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages had an administrator named Margarita Petrovna Dvorszhetskaya. She was an industrious woman who moved heaven and earth in order to get the Dan's program approved. Dan could be pretty motivating, and he had convinced Margarita of the merits of a special kind of academic friendship program. Somehow she figured out how to jump through the hoops of Soviet bureaucracy and accomplished what Dan likely never could have - approval and visas for our team. Years later Dan had the privilege of baptizing Margarita, but that's a whole different story of another life ruined for normalcy.
What made Dan's proposal so innovative was the power of its soul-on-soul intimacy. Putting students together in a classroom to learn about one another was done all the time, but Dan urged the university to allow these students be paired up one-on-one day and night sharing a room. One American student and one Soviet student in a dorm room together for a month. I don't know that any of us fully understood the implications of that arrangement.
The students who participated in that first program were forever ruined - ruined in their understanding of one another as political enemies, ruined in their understanding of themselves and ruined in their puny view of God as they experienced Jesus moving among them. I've not seen any program (it's almost too organic to call it a program) so able to drill deep into a soul in so short a time. It was not essentially in the classroom or in traveling or eating and playing together that students experienced deep and profound change. Rather, it was in the wee hours as they lay awake on their bunk beds - just the two of them - talking late into the night about the things that mattered most.
In retrospect I understand what happens to you when you're joined at the
hip with a stranger from a country with which you are fascinated. The nervous
tension of meeting the person, the secret longing of each for meaningful friendship,
the anxieties about how to behave, the curiosity about what life is really
like for that person; it all adds together to create a kind of combustible
environment.
The intensity of relationships formed that summer was phenomenal. Not just the weeping at the train station and the long letters exchanged in the first few months after the program, but the years hence where they've named kids after one another and made Godparents of each other and traveled to see one another. Meaningful friendships formed. Ruinous friendships.
The model was so revolutionary we've reproduced it dozens of times all over the world with the same effect. University students live to relate at very deep levels. Dan could see that. He could sense this generation's longing for cross-cultural intimacy. And he discerned that IV students were capable of conveying volumes about Jesus when they are in the "home turf" of another person taking the posture of a servant and learner and given a chance to have quantity time with them.
The short-term mission movement has had enormous criticism leveled against it, and, for the most part, it's earned every bit of it. But Dan Harrison created a way to play to the strengths of student culture when he designed the academic friendship program used in our Global Projects. We continue to ruin students' chances for normal lives with it all the time.
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