Woweee, 2008. What a year. I met Mike for the first time in January. I said yes when he asked me to marry him in May. I appeared on the cover of a magazine in (Christian Singles, ironically). I traveled to Australia, Kenya, Tanzania, Washington DC, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan and Colorado. I pondered on what hope means. I tried hard to work on writing. I mostly felt like I was failing on that front.

Deep breath.

And now it’s the last day of the year and CNN is filled with distressing news, as it usually is. Only it’s seemed grimmer and more distressing than usual these last few months – economic downturn, nightclub fires, wars in far away places that really aren’t so far away… It all stands in rather stark contrast to my own happiness at present as I prepare to get married on the 24th of January, and I’m not blind to the shadows.

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Dear fellow CL readers, 

Yes, I have been a bit out of touch. I just got back from several weeks in Kenya and Tanzania (where I got to spend several delightful days with fellow ConversantLife blogger Lisa Borden and her family). Now I'm back in California and catching my breath before heading to the east coast in ten days to host a conference in Virginia. Life during the fall is never boring, that's for sure.  

Months ago now I was asked to submit several devotions for a book being published by Moody, Daily Seeds From Women Who Walk in Faith (Melinda Schmidt, Anita Lustrea, & Lori Neff). That book came out this month, and here is one of the devotions I contributed. Enjoy.

Thanks for stopping by, Lisa

Philippians 1:9 – “And this is my prayer, that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight so that you may be able to discern what is best, and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ.” 

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Below is an article I wrote earlier this year for InterAction's Monday Development's magazine. It was published by them in April, and I'm posting it here for you ConversantLifer's who are interested in aid work and the price tags that can come with that calling (the case study on conditions in Sudan and Chad looks at an assessment conducted by the Headington Institute late last year).

 

Thanks for stopping by,

lisa

 

Psychological Security: The Issue of NGO Staff Wellness

By Lisa McKay, Director of Training & Education Services, Headington Institute

 

Images of desperation and need in refugee camps are familiar to many: row upon row of tents covered with blue tarpaulins, people lining up to receive the food being measured out to them, children whose menacing bravado far outstrips their physical size casually handling AK-47s. They are scenes from Sudan, Chad and many other places. And in and behind these scenes are humanitarian workers trying to help meet those needs.

 

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I'm never quite sure what will happen when I walk into the office on any given day. Tuesday there was a very... enlivening... earthquake. Earthquakes, I learned, are a more effective stimulant than caffeine! 

Yesterday I spent a big chunk of time planning for a trip to Kenya and Tanzania in October. This, unfortunately, falls two weeks after my fiancee moves from Papua New Guinea to LA. We thought it would be nice to spend more than the six weeks we have so far logged in the same city getting to know each other face to face before we get married next January. The same city thing will also help with pre-marital counseling, although if we make more than half of the 10 classes together I'll be impressed. As it stands I'm going to have to attend the first two alone in September before he arrives, he'll have to cover for me for two weeks in October... and I haven't told him yet that it's likely that I will have to go to Washington DC and South Africa in November. 

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I’ve been writing this last couple of weeks. Not just putting down a hundred words here or there, but sitting here for hours at a time. Hours when I don’t feel like sitting here. Hours when I’m not sure what needs to be written next. Hours when I rather desperately want to be... anywhere else, really. I’m aiming for five thousand words a weekend which, for me, is an extraordinarily ambitious goal that I couldn’t even hope to meet if my mother wasn’t rather busy in Australia at the moment planning my wedding.

Unreasonably, though, she has refused to make every decision. Yesterday we had a conversation that went like this:

"But muuuuum. You asked me last week what you could do to help me with this next book, and I said you were already doing the best thing possible by planning the wedding."

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I’ve been in love with reading since before I can remember. Our family photo albums are peppered with photos of me curled up with books – in huts in Bangladesh, on trains in Europe, in the backseat of our car in Zimbabwe. Recently my parents went on holiday to Northern Australia, and I got a postcard from them not of Ayers Rock or Kakadu, but of a little girl propped up against the side of a sleeping calf, reading.

I can’t remember my parents reading to us before bed, although they swear they did – sweet tales about poky puppies and a confused baby bird looking for it’s mother. No, my earliest memories of reading are solitary, sweaty, ones. They are of lying on the cool marble floor of our house in Dhaka. An overhead fan gently stirred the dense heat while I chipped away at frozen applesauce in a small plastic container, book in hand. But it’s from around nine, when we moved from Bangladesh to the States, that my memories of books, just like childhood itself, become clearer.

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I’d always wondered how someone is caught by surprise by a marriage proposal in this day and age. I mean, if you’re in a solid relationship, you’re both good communicators, it feels right, it feels easy… surely you’d have some idea if one party in that equation were scheming to pop the question, right? I mean, how dumb are people?

So, yeah, apparently I’m dumb.

Well, it’s one possibility. Another possibility is that Mike is crazy.

Or Mike could be both dumb and crazy. Or I could be. Or maybe we both are.

I’m still undecided and after the last week they’re all plausible options as far as I can see.

So let’s set the scene here – because setting the scene is a valuable life skill that should be exercised during the shaping of all excellent stories and, the last week suggests, quite possibly in advance of all major life-altering decisions.

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The second half of the interview I did for Canadian public television in Vancouver last year took an unexpected turn. It veered away from the psychological impact of aid work and touched on pedophiles and proselytizing. Didn't think the two topics naturally went together? Neither did I - until questioned on live national television :). Anyway, here's the six minute clip...

 

 

Last December I went up to Vancouver to be interviewed by The Standard on Canadian public television about work and writing. They've recently started posting these interviews online, and here's part one of my 15 minute interview. It's a seven and a half minute clip that looks ever-so-briefly at the psychological impact of aid work on humanitarian workers and some of what the Headington Institute does.

Cheers,

Lisa

 

On Monday I was up at 5am. This was partly because my body was convinced I was still in Michigan (where it had woken up on Sunday) instead of in California. And partly because I needed to be at work at 6am.  

In my opinion 6am is practically an obscene hour of the morning. It’s an hour when no one should have to be at work unless it’s for an exceptionally good cause. But although I grumbled a bit to myself as I left the house in the dark, I did have to admit it was for an exceptionally good cause.  

How it all came about is a long story that starts in January as I was planning for workshops in Kenya. We’re trying a new thing this year at the Headington Institute called regional training - the idea being that we run free workshops on understanding and coping with stress and trauma for humanitarian workers in different cities around the world. In January we were well into organizing our first regional training for humanitarian workers in Kenya. 

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