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. 

Regional training is simple, really. You pick a city. You estimate how many people you think might show up to these free workshops. You book a venue, organize catering, and review your budget. You pull together a team of experienced trainers and counselors. You co-ordinate everyone’s dates, book air tickets, get visas, review the security situation in the destination city, remember to pick up malaria medication, plan the workshops, backup presentation materials, and organize handouts. Oh, and check and double check which day your flight leaves (believe it or not that one has almost derailed me more than once). 

Okay, when I look at all of that maybe it’s not quite so simple. Maybe it’s more like organizing a wedding. In a foreign country. When you don’t know how many people will be attending the reception. And when everyone who does show up is bound to be pretty stressed out.  

So back to Kenya. This was where I was supposed to be heading in March. It was all planned. We’d estimated that about thirty people might show up and we’d made all the bookings. I’d even organized to take a couple of days after the workshops and travel down to Tanzania to spend a couple of days with fellow Conversant Life blogger Lisa Borden, who I know from Pasadena. I was psyched and things were on track.  

I was leaving in January for almost a month but my amazing project manager, Bree, was going to take care of sending out the fliers and organizing the registrations. In the flier we asked people who were interested in attending the free training to send us a 200 word statement of interest about why they felt they’d benefit from attending the workshops. These, I hoped, would help me make sure the training I planned would meet as many of the needs as possible of the approximately 30 people we estimated would turn up.   

So I went on a much needed holiday. Bree sent out the fliers. And instead of thirty registrations, within the first forty eight hours after we sent the announcement out we got flooded with emails from well over a hundred humanitarian workers and mental health professionals who wanted to attend the workshops. And their statements of interest… gut wrenching.  

At the same time things were going from bad to worse in Kenya. I knew when I went on holiday that things were unstable. I’d moved forward anyway, reasoning that the violence would probably have simmered down by March. But by the time I returned to the office in February it was clear that the prudent course of action would be to postpone these workshops. The chances of someone getting hurt, or worse, when we had a hundred people who would have had to travel around Nairobi to reach the training…  Given that we can still go later this year, it didn’t seem worth the risk. 

So we postponed, which we hated to have to do when the need there is so clearly acute. And we started thinking about what we could do in the meantime to help support these hundred people who’d wanted so much to attend the workshops. One thing we decided to do was offer some free phone counseling to any registrant who wanted to take us up on that. Another was to organize several hour-long webinars (virtual online trainings) on the topic of resilience in the face of trauma. It was one of these webinars I was trundling off to co-facilitate at 6am on Monday morning.  

The session this past Monday was designed for other mental health professionals, and we had several counselors who are currently working with kids living in slum areas. Kids who have seen and heard awful, awful, things in the last four months. “It’s overwhelming to know what violence and poverty can do to children’s lives,” one counselor said. “My passion is about helping advocate for children so they are better served and more protected. So when the political situation means that stray bullets from the police have killed two of our students, I feel powerless.” 

We ended up talking a lot on Monday about this issue of feeling overwhelmed and powerless and what can anchor us in the face of that. In the face of violence, and injustice, and the fragility of life in a place where people are regularly being killed in the streets what do we have to offer as helpers? And what weapons do we really have to fight against this feeling of powerlessness?  These are important question to ponder, because research on “learned helplessness” suggests that when we become mute or frozen for too long in the face of powerlessness, we tend to end up rather hopelessly traumatized.  

One person talked of the key role their faith has played in helping anchor them. “I have found that because I can release my powerlessness to God there is a sense of relief. I feel so for friends who do not have faith and can only release the powerlessness into anger.”  

“Being there is so critical, even if you don’t know what to say,” someone else said. “Your mere presence is hope. The fact that you are alive, and walking, and talking, and present – that sends the message that there is life and hope somewhere, that a different kind of future is possible. Jesus walked among the people. We tend to focus only on the miracles that were performed, but he must have spent most of his time walking among the people, and I think that, in itself, brought hope.”  

This theme of the power of presence is what stuck with me long after we’d wrapped up our discussion. Presence can seem like such a small offering. More than once I’ve sat on a plane myself wondering what I can possibly say in the workshops I’m going to give that will make it worth the time, the money, the energy and the risk to get there. But I was reminded again on Monday of times when the presence of other people in my life has been that anchor. I might not now be able to recall even what they said, but I do remember their presence. Their loving, caring, understanding presence, and the message that sent that I was not alone.  

This is what the counselors we had the privilege of talking to in Kenya are trying to do for children in the slums of Nairobi right now. And what we at the Headington Institute, imperfectly and across many miles and time zones, are trying to do for them. This is what makes a 6am start worth it. The chance that you might, by showing up and through the power of presence if nothing else, sow some seeds of hope in fields of violence and despair.