In a Reddit post published on r/AmITheA**hole, Redditor u/6fcr6es said they broke out laughing after another student claimed she went on a mission trip to the original poster’s hometown in Virginia.

Titled, “AITA for laughing at a girl who went on a ‘mission trip’ to an ‘impoverished area’ but it was actually just my hometown,” the viral post has received more than 15,000 votes and 1,800 comments in just 10 hours.

Explaining that they are currently enrolled in a public speaking class, u/6fcr6es said students were recently giving presentations about meaningful moments in their lives, when they recognized the setting of one classmate’s life-altering experience.

“This girl presented on her church group mission trip to an ‘impoverished’ area and how it showed her how people live with so little but are happy and how it’s important to think of the needy,” they wrote. “Halfway through the presentation, she showed a slide of herself and her group posing beside my hometown’s welcome sign! And it hit me, her trip was to my town.”

“I couldn’t help it, I started to laugh,” they continued. “It drew everyone’s attention, and the harder I tried to stop laughing, the harder I laughed.”

Following a request from their professor to explain why they were laughing, u/6fcr6es said they were blunt in their response.

“That’s my hometown!,” the Redditor exclaimed. “It’s a normal a** hometown, I thought she was talking about somewhere impoverished but that’s just a nice small town in Virginia!”

More than 1.5 million Americans embark on mission trips each year, according to researchers at Baylor University.

Spending more than $2 billion on those mission trips, Christians in the United States traditionally travel to other countries to, as Mission Direct states, “spread their faith through good deeds.”

Assisting with house building and renovation projects, hospital construction and the expansion of school buildings, mission trips are intended to help communities grow, and ensure that growth is sustained over time.

However, religious mission trips have long been criticized for the harmful effects they can have on community groups that claim they are trying to help — and in cases like the one described in the viral Reddit post, those communities don’t need help at all.

Despite their classmate’s assurance that the town she visited was “so grateful,” u/6fcr6es said they jumped at the opportunity to ask her about programs their hometown already offered, and about how her church group positively impacted their community.

“At the end of the presentation she had time for questions, and I asked…if she was aware of the many after school programs, community sports, big sister little sister programs, YMCA programs [and] informal care groups that were already available, and what additional services her group provided that were lacking,” they wrote.

“She really didn’t have an answer for it,” they added.

Redditors responding to the viral post were quick to call out the original poster’s classmate.

In the post’s top comment, which has received more than 20,000 votes, one Redditor questioned if the supposed mission trip was a mission trip at all.

“[Not the a**hole] and it wasn’t a mission trip,” they commented. “Sounds like they went to visit a sister church which is different than a mission trip.”

Redditor u/LuLu_531, whose comment has received more than 2,500 votes, shared a story similar to the original poster’s, and said they would have had the same reaction had they witnessed their classmate’s presentation.

“Some church group brought a group of teens to my town in a mission trip one summer,” they wrote. “They were all over for a week basically just roaming around in their mission t-shirts.”

“My town is an upper middle class suburb with 20+ churches for a population around 10,000,” they added. “It was a joke and if I’d seen a presentation on the poverty they found I would have had a hard time not laughing.”

Although the majority of commenters on the viral Reddit post assured u/6fcr6es they were justifiably perturbed by the presentation, some Redditors said they could have handled the situation differently.

“[Not the ahole] for laughing, that seemed like an automatic response,” Redditor u/Pro-Craftinator commented. “But maybe kind of an ahole for questioning her in front of the class. You could have asked her later about why her church thought your town was in need of their (dubious) mission.”