Compassion Fatigue Solutions

...Yes, from the tasty snack, which means I have lots of different things to write about and also means that I ate way too much salty food last night, watching the Oscars. I feel like a block of salt today. ugh. What was I thinking?

First of all, thank you to all the participants who took part in last week's Compassion Fatigue Train the Trainer workshop. I met twenty wonderful people and I think we all enjoyed having the opportunity to slow down and get a chance to talk to each other for two days (and be incredibly well fed, to boot). You were all very much in my thoughts as I visualised each of you making your way back home, either close to Kingston or all the way East. Thank you for your willingness to share in the way that you did, to take risks and to offer us, in turn, the gift of the wisdom of your experiences.

It was a gorgeous sunny weekend in this part of the world. There was much premature celebration of Spring going on in Kingston with many people running outside in, brrr, shorts even though it was only about 5 degrees (we get a bit spring crazy, us Canadians don't we?). My brother - who is also one of my best friends, and his wonderful family were visiting and we took many long walks, talked and ate and and talked some more. There was also a surprise visit from my beloved, gorgeous, super smart, trilingual 23 year old sister Doudou. Doudou is a graduate student in Montreal studying international development. She has lived in Mali, Nicaragua and Kashmir (so far) and is currently planning on returning to Africa and India as soon as her thesis is done. She is very thoughtful and extremely well informed about international aid and the challenges facing developing countries. After three years of living abroad, she is also dealing with reverse culture shock, coming back into our profligate consumer culture.

In Kashmir, Doudou lived for many months with a family that had not one stitch of furniture in their home and very little to eat. Ditto in Nicaragua and in Mali. In Paris, she worked with the homeless for several months. Yesterday, as we were sitting and chatting, she told a story about this wonderful wise homeless man she used to work with and finished by saying "oh, and then one day, he was stabbed 19 times and died. That was really upsetting."

From these experiences, I see, through her eyes, that the world is never going to be quite the same again. There is a richness to what she is learning and a huge passion for the work that is still to come, but, as her older sister, I feel this protective urge to spare her the pain of what she is going to continue seeing. Of course, then, when she starts talking, I realise that she has already seen too much for me to prevent any vicarious trauma from occurring. It has already happened and it is a normal consequence of the work that she has been doing.

One thing that surprises and angers me is that in her preparatory training to deploy to these countries, she did not receive much, if any, VT training from the NGOs. I thought we were doing better than that in this day and age.

Hearing Doudou's stories, I also feel elated to see a young person who is truly a citizen of the world, and who brings a highly knowledgeable perspective to international work. I like to hold on to these encounters to combat the cynicism I sometimes hear from my slightly older friends who often launch into the old litany of "kids these days...." which they follow with a complaint about how entitled, materialistic, self-centered, what have you they perceive kids in their twenties to be. In fact, in my experience, many of the young people I speak to are not spoiled electronic brats who expect immediate gratification for everything. The people I am meeting across the country are really engaged and concerned about the society we live in, the environment, racism and poverty.

I think that sometimes, when we, the older generations, get tired and overwhelmed, we also get defensive and stop being open to the voices of people younger than us.

I, for one, am excited to hear what they have to say.