I remembered one. A woman at our church asked for donations for her "mission" trip to Africa.
It was really a safari trip for her plus maybe 6 days in Uganda with one of the missionaries who is a son of another member in the congregation. This mission is ok, but more because it is set up as a working locally run co-op business where the organizer only takes living expenses and modest stipend, and does not help a lot of people because of the nature of it. i.e., it is not registered or funded as a charity in any way, and there would be nothing for her to do other than tour it and learn about it.
I think she heard rumours that a mission trip can generate a lot of donations to offset your costs, and she jumped on it. Our church body does not tend to send any people to start missions anywhere.
A relative badmouthed about it behind her back, "she wants us to fund her personal trip"... it got back to her and caused a big flare up. But the next thing I know is that she stopped asking for money. She gets back in two weeks, so I hope to find out how it went and if she got off the tourist track.
Ah, the miracle of the mission-cation. Disaster relief tourism is also popular. I frequently badmouth such operations, but I do it to the face of the people involved just so I can see their reactions.
Not all disaster relief travel is stupid. I've got a cousin with a doctorate in nursing who does relief missions: on her vacation time, she piggybacks on MSF operations and through her church. She's got the credentials to actually educate the people she meets and routinely sets up nurse training while she's in-country and converts illiterate field hands into competent hospital staff. She's a hardcore badass and I salute her for it often. But she also doesn't solicit for donations to fund that work, because she's got funding out the wazoo already. That's not what I mean by relief tourism. I mean the stuff like in this following anecdote.
Some years ago, following a big disaster in the Philippines, I got hit up by a daughter of a family friend (our families are still friends... kind of...) for a donation to send her and some other young volunteers from her church group to Manila to help with a rescue operation. Now these are high school and college aged students with big hearts but not a lot of skill at logistics. So I put a velvet glove on my scythe and went Socratic. The conversation went roughly like this.
Me: So, they need to rebuild roads, bridges, houses and such. Are you a civil engineer?
Kid: No.
Me: Plumber? Electrician? Even a first-year apprentice could do some useful work getting power and plumbing back on-line.
Kid: No.
Me: OK, do you have a background in construction? Can you drive a forklift, maybe, or operate a bulldozer to help get the roads open?
Kid: No.
Me: All right, maybe you can work in the hospital. You're too young to be a medical doctor, but do you have nursing credentials? A bit of clinical study, maybe?
Kid: No.
Me: Do you know any Tagalog? Like if someone came up to you and said (here I inserted a Tagalog phrase meaning "I need a drink of water"), could you tell what that person was trying to say?
Kid: No. What's Tagalog?
Me: It's the local language. Very few of the people you're trying to help speak English.
A few other questions established that none of the other young people going on the mission had the credentials I was asking about either. So I told the kid that as much as I respected her desire to help, I couldn't support the plan in its current form because it would do more harm than good. In a disaster zone they'd be unable to do anything really useful that the locals couldn't do better, and in the meantime they'd be in the way, vulnerable to danger, and consuming food and housing resources that could instead be given to local people who had lost their homes. But if they were willing to collect for a real and experienced relief group like MSF or the Red Cross, I'd be willing to donate (and I said a number that, for me, was a sizable but affordable amount). Sometime later I heard from the parents that the trip had been cancelled. They never did collect for a real relief group, so I ended up donating elsewhere.