'Barbie Savior' pokes fun at millennial missionaries

Her name is Barbie Savior. Her tagline: “Jesus. Adventures. Africa. Two worlds. One love. Babies. Beauty. Not qualified. Called. 20 years young. It’s not about me … but it kind of is.”

With nearly 100,000 followers, the Barbie Savior satirical Instagram account has touched a nerve. Her two anonymous twenty-something creators—who say they formerly shared Barbie’s “white savior complex”—wanted to spur self-absorbed millennials to think about their motives for volunteering.

The Instagram account shows Barbie hugging African babies, taking “slumfies” with orphans, and bottling her tears as drinking water for the “country of Africa.” Her favorite punctuation is the exclamation point: “It was fun making an eternal impact on the wild life around here for this past week! Although I’ll probably forget about this experience pretty quickly, you know what they say, an elephant NEVER forgets!” Her hashtags do the talking: “#iwon’trememberyou #willyourememberme?”

“It really just started as a joke between us, a way to get some of these things off of our chest,” Barbie Savior’s creators told the Huffington Post. “It’s hard to pinpoint the irony at times in real life … the wildly self-centered person veiled as the self-sacrificing saint.”

Ron Thomas used to train inexperienced college-age volunteers and interns for Mission to the World (MTW) and said the satire is insightful.

“It’s kind of funny and you can laugh at it, but it’s kind of sad because it can be true in some cases,” he said. “It could be a helpful tool in training. Humor is a way of addressing sensitive issues in a non-threatening way.”

Thomas doesn’t remember training any “Barbie saviors,” but he recognizes that even a genuine desire to serve can be sidetracked when missionaries focus more on tweeting than learning from their hosts and team. He advises volunteers to have a humble attitude and not to assume they can fix everything: “Ask questions and be respectful of the culture.”

Marc Mailloux, a French-speaking missionary who trains pastors in Haiti, first traveled there as a translator for a short-term trip. He said the hardships of a full-time mission career, or even a short-term experience, turn away most Barbie-savior types, but warns young missionaries about being over-ambitious during short trips.

“A friend of mine once said to me, ‘Never overestimate what you can do in two years and never underestimate what you can do in 20 years,’” said Mailloux—far past the expiration date for Barbie Savior’s travels.