Growing as Good Practitioners--1. Staying Healthy in Difficult places

Lecture One

The Pearls and the Perils:

Staying Healthy in Difficult Places

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We want to dedicate the next three entries to the many graduate and undergraduate students that we recently met, while teaching in California in February. We are writing this after the fact, in March, as we were way too busy to keep up with the weblog while in California. How neat to meet and interact with so many students from Fuller Seminary, St Thomas College (Houston), Rosemead School of Psychology, Azusa Pacific University, and Bethel Seminary.

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May you find the clear way, with God's help, through the deserts and fertile plains of higher education, as you head towards work as mental health profesionals. Stay tuned for more information on the free lecture articles and videos that will be on-line.

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Here is a summary of the first lecture.

Staying Healthy in Difficult Places

Opportunities, danger, duty, hell. Staying sane—and alive—in unstable, crazy places is a serious challenge for mission/aid workers. In this presentation we’ll explore how the member care field helps workers manage such challenges. The foci include: an historical overview, struggles of workers, supportive resources, and future directions. We’ll look at how mission/aid personnel, like many of the people with whom they work, are exposed to malaria, land mines, natural disasters, debilitating relational conflicts, and the ongoing experience of human misery and poverty. We’ll examine how mission/aid workers and their sending groups must cooperate together in order to maintain a healthy work-life balance: adequate preparation, positive health behaviors, support for workers’ families, debriefing, crisis counseling, and training opportunities. We’ll review some personal accounts by mission/aid workers from around the world, and consider how best to practice member care in light of future realities, including the development of psychosocial/health skills to work in complex humanitarian emergencies and training member care workers from around the world.