cross cultural counseling

4/24/07 - late morning
I find that writing about the events of our week in Masii is expanding. I originally thought I would write one post per day, but as I am reliving the time in my mind and reviewing my journal, every section of each day has a story connected with it. While we were in Masii, I told Laureen that something very strange was happening to my sense of time. While we were leading up to the trip, time seemed to fly by and so much had to be done, I was nearly frantic by the time we left. Once we were gone, however, our time was filled with so many new experiences that it seemed to slow down -- very strange. I wrote at one point on 5/24/07 "I can hardly believe that we have only been in Kenya 5 days..." so much has happened. Now, writing about it has had the same effect...

After returning from seeing Nthenya, I went looking for Ellen and Esther told me where she was. I found her in a classroom with a young boy. He had been having terrible nightmares while he was away at a boarding school. Apparently the mother of a friend of his at the school did not wish him well (there is still quite a bit of stigma attached to being the child of an AIDS sufferer), and he believed that she was sending demons to torment him in his sleep. He was very unhappy and said that he is usually fine at home with his relatives. Much of the sadness and fear that bothers the children is related to the grief they suffer with loss of their parents -- the world now seems to be a frightening place without their parents to protect them. As I mentioned before, the theme of this VBS is "God is our Father" which encourages the children to take their fears and worries to God. We encouraged the boy, and prayed for him (we took care of business -- Ellen bound Satan away from him and I lined up angels to protect him!). Ellen told him to pray, read his Bible and sing some songs before he went to bed, to keep good thoughts in his head, and to remember to ask Jesus to protect him from evil - we reminded him that the demons cannot hurt him since he has given his heart to Jesus. He seemed a little brighter when we were done. We would see him again later in the week.

After the session, I told Ellen that a technique I often used with children who were having a recurrent nightmare was to help them plan a way to fight back when the bad thing was happening in their dream, and then tell themselves to "Wake up!" so that they would have some control. She liked this idea very much and we decided that we would tell him about it the next time we talked to him.

It also was interesting to find that in this very Christian country, there is still fear of witchcraft. Ellen says that it is not common, but that this is what she believed was going on with this boy. I found that the people are very spiritual and very aware of the "powers of this world" as the Bible calls them. Spiritual warfare is not a catch phrase to them...it's real.

It is surprising that more of the children are not depressed, or have behavior problems. I attribute this to the structure built into the society for the care of children. Their role is well-defined and their behavior is also. The Tumaini children are the more fortunate ones of the AIDS orphans in Kenya, in that for the most part, their guardians care about them very much. Ellen did say that when they first started the organization, there were some guardians that were unkind to the children, out of fear or misunderstanding of what had happened. Educational sessions have helped increase better treatment of the children.