Witnessing

Self care: A building block for the revolution

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Why self- and community care is no longer a “nice-to-have.”

This guest post is written by Jennifer Lentfer. Jennifer is a poet, leadership coach in the global development sector, the creator of the blog how-matters.org, and an advisory circle member of Healing Solidarity. Join Healing Solidarity’s 2021 conference “Making different choices,” a virtual space with collective care sessions and “in-between conversations” dedicated to re-imagining international aid and development starting Monday, October 11th through Friday, October 15th, 2021. More information and sign-up at healingsolidarity.org.

Image from a self-care guide for youth created by ArtReach.

I could feel the anxiety mount as I returned to my inbox after only a half hour meeting and found 10 new emails. In the past, I would have pushed past that feeling, ignored it, kept working, worked late to respond to everything. Instead, in this moment, I chose to walk away and wrote myself a mantra for when it happens again.

Because it will happen again.

My struggles with self care, which I wrote about on my blog in 2016, show you the transformation I’m courting. Simpler times, 2016. No insurgents storming the capital or despotic leaders living down the street from me in Washington, D.C. then. Not yet the #AidToo upsurges, the COVID-19 pandemic, nor the global #BlackLivesMatter uprisings. Not yet a media landscape that magnifies fear and foments polarization 24/7.

Now it seems that the stakes have been raised. Self care is no longer a luxury, nor is it even negotiable. It is, as Audre Lorde explained, resistance. She wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

In a world that does not fully recognize my humanity, taking care of myself and extending that care to others in my community is revolution.

And the revolution doesn’t come easy, nor quickly. At this point, if I don’t carve out enough recharge time for myself, my work and my writing struggles. But more importantly, my entire team struggles then too. We’re in this together, after all.

Self-care for me now is ultimately about self-love. Community care (what most of us really need – belonging, safety, to feel less alone) is ultimately about being in relationship – showing love to each other, being willing to admit that we can’t do everything ourselves, and allowing ourselves to be cared for by others.

Do we need so much “self-care” if we’re no longer living in isolated, self-centered ways?

My work is often to disrupt and complicate narratives that portray the “hyper,” escapist expat aid worker or the nonprofit martyr/savior archetype with “helping profession syndrome,” but still, some deeper questions are required. When I love myself, when I allow my community to love me, I can admit that all that overworking helped cover up a lot of experiences and feelings from which I was running.

In many places where the political, environmental, economic threats and issues are so acute, there is no safety.

Turns out there never was.

But thank goodness, I am loved. And now I have this mantra to remind me of that:

Let me rest in my overwhelm.
Let me shift these thought patterns.
There is enough.
Enough time.
Enough resources.
Enough creativity.
Enough joy.
For me. For us.
I am not diminished by the enormity of suffering and inequality around me.
I am not diminished by the requests coming my way.
And I need not aim to be indispensable. I already am.
Let me aim for optimal functioning, with love, with enthusiasm, with spaciousness, with enoughness, with creation and community at the center.
Every time those shrinking thoughts creep up, guide me Lord/Universe/Gaia to walk away, regroup, feel into the possible, and return, return, return.
I am love.
I am fierce, mother love.
I am open, innocent, child love.
I am not defined by requests of me. I am guided by the vision we are bringing forth. I am living into a new world.
We are redefining.
I can see what’s possible.
All the rest are details.

Searching for happiness in camp Moria

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This post is written by Martijn R Hofman, a psychologist in the humanitarian field.

DW-camp-Moria

The ‘exit-gate’ in the fence surrounding Camp Moria on the Greek Island of Lesbos. Source: DW/Dimitri Tosidis

Preface

Last year, Janneke Woudstra and I, both mental health professionals, friends and colleagues at the Dutch mental health organisation the Parnassia Group, worked for several weeks for the Boat Refugee Foundation as volunteers to provide psychological aid to the refugees that are living in camp Moria (Lesbos, Greece). Based on our experiences I wrote a personal essay called “Searching for happiness in camp Moria.”

At the time I wrote this essay, the world still seemed a “normal place.” Now, almost a year after our visit to refugee camp Moria, the world has changed. No one had heard of the Coronavirus or COVID-19 a year ago. Now, the virus has put our lives on this planet “on hold”, with disastrous health and economic consequences for many. At the same time, hopefully it is making many of us more aware of our lifestyles’ deleterious effects on our planet, and the importance of solidarity and good health for all. As is often the case with natural- or man-made disasters, vulnerable groups—such as people who have been uprooted and are living as “migrants” or “refugees”—are most heavily impacted both directly and indirectly by this global pandemic.

A personal essay on searching for happiness in a refugee camp seems, from the new context in which we are all living nowadays, somehow irrelevant as everyone focuses on survival—in its most basic sense, on staying alive. Honestly speaking, I don’t think surviving is the only important thing now. Especially in times of hardship such as this, our human search for happiness still comes to the fore. Suddenly, it becomes even more apparent that happiness is not to be found in individual goals, rather we find it in joining with others toward common goals. In knowing that we share our lives on this planet with each other, and that we are all in a way responsible for each other. Happiness is grounded on the principle of solidarity.

For this reason, I am convinced that the essay I wrote last year is perhaps even more valuable nowadays. I hope it will inspire you.

* * *

As a colleague and I are walking up the road, we pass two young women  walking arm in arm. They are dressed fashionably and laughing as they look at their mobile phones, completely fitting into the bustling, international street life of the Netherlands, where my colleague and I are from. Yet we are not in Amsterdam; we are in Moria, a refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece, where these young women live as refugees alongside many other people from Syria, Afghanistan and other countries. They have just passed through an “exit-gate”— essentially a hole in the large fence that encircles the camp.

I am a psychologist from the Netherlands. A couple of months ago, I provided psychosocial support as part of the Dutch Boat Refugee Foundation’s community team in camp Moria. Originally a military base, with the accompanying excess of fencing and barbwire, it has been used to house people arriving in Greece as refugees since 2015. The camp population is currently estimated to fluctuate around 20,000, well over its capacity of 3,000.

As a psychologist, I was interested in observing how happiness is experienced by those living in the camp. I had come to camp Moria with my own Continue reading →

A World Refugee Day Reading List

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We’ve written in the past about how much writing and writers can nourish and sustain us. As Anne Lamott put it, in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life:

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. … It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

Singing in the storm is all too apt an analogy to use on June 20th, which has been marked as World Refugee Day since the beginning of this millennium. This year, UNHCR’s official statistics tell a shocking story: 70.8 million people forced from there homes, among them almost 26 million refugees, over half of whom are children.

Many of us know what this looks like all too well: we have worked alongside people fleeing; we have known them as friends, family, neighbors, colleagues; we have advocated for and defended their rights. We have celebrated the hospitality of those that open their homes and businesses and borders; raged against the hostility of those who want to build literal or figurative walls; and despaired the apathy of those who don’t seem to care. Some of us are refugees ourselves.

Every person has a story to tell. Those who, at some point in their lives, find themselves living as refugees are no exception. Some have written down their stories, and shared them with the world–even if that meant sending them via text message from Manus Island.

This #WorldRefugeeDay, we have put together a list of six great books authored by women and men who, among many other identities, are or were refugees. Read on for our recommendations and  Continue reading →

Impossible Decisions

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This post is by Adam Tousley, who currently works for an INGO in northern Iraq.

Buddhist protests_crop

Photo provided by author; source unknown.

On 25 August 2017 in Maungdaw Town, Northern Rakhine State (NRS), Burma, I was planning to go for a run at 6:00 AM.  The day before, the United Nations Department of Safety & Security, who were a three-hour boat ride away, stated that despite the heightened tension between the Rohingya and Rakhine communities there was nothing overly concerning. Instead I woke up at 3:00 AM to a large exchange of gunfire outside my INGO guest house.

There is a common nightmare for some people finding themselves naked in public places.  Take it from me; waking up semi-naked in a gunfight in Burma is far worse, especially if you’re a bearded pasty white dude.  Our buildings were targeted by small arms gunfire, and my organization was singled out for attack on social media (thanks Facebook).  After two days in hibernation my colleagues and I were directed to evacuate.

No one can be fully prepared to lead a base through evacuation in a rapid onset emergency.  For those who have, you may remember the frustration in finding a carefully developed evacuation plan was not as developed as you had envisioned (at least I hope I’m not the only one).  What had been the worst-case scenario on your risk assessment yesterday was the reality today.  The road you could run on yesterday is now Continue reading →

Policy, practice, and poetry

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This post is written by Jennifer Lentfer. Jennifer is the creator of the blog how-matters.org and Director of Communications at Thousand Currents. This week, she joins 21 other diverse speakers at Healing Solidarity, a free online conference posing critical questions about healing, inequity, exhaustion, and challenging power structures in international aid and development. Join the conversation at healingsolidarity.org and follow #HealingSolidarity.

Practice-Solidarity

People are waking up to big issues in international aid. Now what?  Image from the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) #PracticeSolidarity campaign 

*   *   *

A journalist recently asked me, “Do you know anyone who would be willing to go on the record as resistant to change?”

“Good luck,” I thought. Institutional bodies are adept at portraying its leaders as on trend and non-controversial, and no self-respecting do-gooder is going to oppose more racial and gender diversity outright at this time in our history. However I constantly encounter “good people” who may or may not be aware of the white privilege and supremacy that runs through aid institutions, or who haven’t developed the personal resiliency to talk openly about the historical origins of our sector and the political and identity-driven realities that affect every aspect of our day-to-day work.

Policies that support diversity and inclusion are in place. What we now have to shift is the practice. For people with positional power and for those with privilege, this may  Continue reading →

Writing stories otherwise untold

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This post is the first in a two-part series by Trayle Kulshan. Trayle recently finished her memoir, “Revolutions”: 99 lyrical, 99-word stories from her travels as an aid worker. You can find it on Amazon and read samples on her website. 

Optical_illusion_disc_with_birds,_butterflies,_and_a_man_jumping

Source: “McLean’s optical illusions.” T. McLean. 1833. 1 portfolio: 11 lithographs on discs, hand-colored, discs are to be spun on a spindle, and observed in a mirror, to create the illusion of a moving image, 25 x 25 cm. As seen on the cover of “Revolutions”. Animated GIFs from Wikimedia users Trialsanderrors & Racconish. 

Just before their eyes glaze over. That’s the point when someone usually tosses out the well-worn phrase, “Oh, you’ve been to so many interesting places, you should write a book.”

So, I did.

Indeed, like most aid workers I have enjoyed working in “many interesting places”: Guinea, DRC, Kenya, Afghanistan, Egypt. I was a WASH specialist for more than 10 years, during which I met my Syrian husband who introduced me to the Middle East, and—after many exciting exploits together—parenthood. We had a baby and settled in Dubai, where he took a good HQ-type job. So here I was, being a full-time mommy, missing the action-packed field I figured it was time to write the book.

But a funny thing happened… it ended up not really being about aid work adventures at all. It ended up being about me. It ended up being about gaining perspective, and about Continue reading →

Two weeks

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This week’s post is written by J, a humanitarian aid worker, novelist and prolific blogger whose sites include Tales from the Hood, AidSpeak, and co-creating Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like. To stay up-to-date with J’s aid-related writing, commentary, and fiction, check out his Evil Genius website, facebook and twitter pages. 

empty-desk

Source: Waters True Value wants you to know how to organize your desk

Two weeks. That’s how long it takes, on average, for the so-called high performing and indispensable aid worker to be forgotten. You know, the one who knew the local language and culture so well they were “practically local”? Or the one who threw the fabulous parties, or the one who always knew who in the host government to ask for what. Or maybe it was the one who—by sheer force of will or expertise—managed to accomplish what no one else had prior.

Everyone else was certain this person was irreplaceable, that the office or programme just could not go on without him or her. And you know what? Within ten working days – just two weeks – their old office or cubicle had already been reassigned, IT had reformatted their old computer, and their old position had either been refilled or their responsibilities divvied up among those left behind.

I once knew a guy who got blindsided by a downsize dressed up as a restructure. It was a shitty way for the organization to move him along, and everyone felt it. Staff were incensed and outraged in the coffee room. He’d had a long and illustrious career. He had Continue reading →

Whose truth is it anyway?

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This post is written by an anonymous Missing in the Mission blogger.

Post-truth. Fake news. Alternative facts. As I look back at my diary from early 2016, it’s striking how much my landscape has changed; pre-Brexit, pre-Trump, I could describe the world around me, I knew what I was advocating for and my words worked. There were some touchstone certainties, however painful some of them were, and a trust, and shared understanding, in the words that described them. I was writing an alternative world into being, a different vision, but I was starting from somewhere else.

‘Elite’ evidently no longer means resourced, connected, networked, privileged, advantaged. From its use in recent months, it seems ‘elite’ now means has ideas, shares ideas, thinks about things, values creativity and art. By this definition, most of the women I have worked with in humanitarian crises are elite, though the opportunities they have to act on any of their thoughts and ideas are so constrained they barely exist, and saying those thoughts out loud could easily get them killed. Events are reported as Continue reading →

Cake & commitment

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It’s been a long time since our last post. So long, we considered closing our proverbial doors—with a big thanks to all of you for sharing your words, and reading and sharing the words of others.

It was at that very moment that a post first sent in February re-surfaced, after a deep-dive to the hidden corners of gmail, where it lay dormant for 9 months. The author is still eager to share it and the piece (unfortunately, given the subject) is still relevant. Online next week.

Next, a fierce woman street artist reached out to offer her artistic services to design a logo + some merchandise for Missing in the Mission. In time for the holidays, with the idea of raising money for a cause of our choice. Stay tuned.

And an experienced aid worker, on her way back from responding to the Rohingya crisis in Bangladesh, asked if she could share Continue reading →