I have a clinical internship this year, and one of the things I've been doing every week is group therapy for 8-10 year olds. Its supposed to focus on communcation skills.
I'm pretty new to the role of teacher type person slash...someone who is ever around children at all, so I've been getting a kick out of a lot of the stuff they say. A lot of the funniest stuff is not relatable with the written word, but this week I think we got one that I can pass on.
We've spent the last several weeks discussing how to share and how to all come to an agreement about things as a group and, about a month ago, we even introduced the word "compromise."
I thought my co-therapist was jumping the gun on that word, they are pretty young, but after a couple weeks they were using that word left and right without our prompting and it seemed like they were really getting the idea. We even had a kid carry it over into his individual therapy and talk about how he "compromised" with his sister by sharing the last cookie.
We were beaming with success and so proud of our super smart kiddos.
This week a new girl joined group. My co-therapist says "What do we do when we don't know someone?"
A resounding answer: "Com-pro-mise!"
So much for THAT victory.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Thoughts from Shantaram
I've been reading Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts. Its quite an impressive book. Its an autobiographical account of his time living in Bombay as an escaped convict from Australia. He is so insightful. He writes with such beauty, some of his simplest descriptions make me want to put the book down and cry. And, always a bonus, he is funny as well. I absolutey recommend this book to anyone who hasn't read it.
I'm only about 100 pages into the 1000 page book, but there's an issue he's already brought up a couple of times that I have been getting stuck on. He describes India graphicly and honestly, making note of some shocking things he witnesses, such as a child slave market. He goes on to discuss his attitude that there are a lot of extremely horrible things in this world, and the only way to make them worse is when someone tries to help, and this seems to be his argument, his excuse, the balm to his conscience as to why he never takes action in any of these situations.
Now, I agree that there are a lot of instances where people are trying, with the purest of hearts, to improve a situation and all they do is screw it up in a myriad of new ways. Especially when you have all these westerners trying to enter different cultures and dominate the relief effort, without taking the time to understand the nuances of the very people they are extending their "aid" toward. Identifying these kinds of situations is, in fact, a big part of the master's program that I am in. Its also a big concern for me, that in my desire to work abroad I may find myself in a job that perpetuates a problem instead of alleviating it. I would quite honestly never ever work abroad than to be in that kind of position, and in fact have lately wondered if I should even puruse international work anymore. My point in all this me-focused rambling is that I do, quite deeply, understand that when there's pain in the world, it is no simple matter of just entering the scene with good intentions, and all becomes well.
But does that mean we shouldn't even try? Everyone should just keep their eyes on the ground, not reach out to other human beings, just because any condition, no matter how bad it is, could always be made worse? That is an awful, lazy, dismissive way of interpreting the world. I'm not saying Roberts could have fixed everything he witnessed, not even close, but damn, he could have at least tried. And maybe he does, later in the book, but I really don't think so.
This issue comes up when he's talking about being taken to a child slave market. He remarks on the starving children, and their ragged clothes, and their palpable fear. Then he frankly admits that he took not a single step to interfere with this process, to inquire about it later, to examine the system and see if there was a way to break it, to crack it, to even get one or two children out. Again, the argument about being a foreigner, about not making things worse, about trying to look at the bright side. The bright side of the situation, as he sees it, is that these kids would have starved to death, or died from disease if their parents had not sold them into the slave market. For every one Indian child that found themselves sold into the slave market, dozens more simply perished. Who is he to say that a life of slavery, of sexual abuse, of being treated as property is better than dying? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, maybe it depends on who you are. But it certainly isn't so simple as to say "in fact, these children are lucky to be slaves, because the only other option for them is death." Targeting death as the very worst possible outcome is in itself a very western attitude.
Interfering in any problem, whether it be micro or macro, always carries with it the possibility of making things worse. Its important to recognize that. But I can not, I will not believe that doing nothing is the best possible option.
I'm only about 100 pages into the 1000 page book, but there's an issue he's already brought up a couple of times that I have been getting stuck on. He describes India graphicly and honestly, making note of some shocking things he witnesses, such as a child slave market. He goes on to discuss his attitude that there are a lot of extremely horrible things in this world, and the only way to make them worse is when someone tries to help, and this seems to be his argument, his excuse, the balm to his conscience as to why he never takes action in any of these situations.
Now, I agree that there are a lot of instances where people are trying, with the purest of hearts, to improve a situation and all they do is screw it up in a myriad of new ways. Especially when you have all these westerners trying to enter different cultures and dominate the relief effort, without taking the time to understand the nuances of the very people they are extending their "aid" toward. Identifying these kinds of situations is, in fact, a big part of the master's program that I am in. Its also a big concern for me, that in my desire to work abroad I may find myself in a job that perpetuates a problem instead of alleviating it. I would quite honestly never ever work abroad than to be in that kind of position, and in fact have lately wondered if I should even puruse international work anymore. My point in all this me-focused rambling is that I do, quite deeply, understand that when there's pain in the world, it is no simple matter of just entering the scene with good intentions, and all becomes well.
But does that mean we shouldn't even try? Everyone should just keep their eyes on the ground, not reach out to other human beings, just because any condition, no matter how bad it is, could always be made worse? That is an awful, lazy, dismissive way of interpreting the world. I'm not saying Roberts could have fixed everything he witnessed, not even close, but damn, he could have at least tried. And maybe he does, later in the book, but I really don't think so.
This issue comes up when he's talking about being taken to a child slave market. He remarks on the starving children, and their ragged clothes, and their palpable fear. Then he frankly admits that he took not a single step to interfere with this process, to inquire about it later, to examine the system and see if there was a way to break it, to crack it, to even get one or two children out. Again, the argument about being a foreigner, about not making things worse, about trying to look at the bright side. The bright side of the situation, as he sees it, is that these kids would have starved to death, or died from disease if their parents had not sold them into the slave market. For every one Indian child that found themselves sold into the slave market, dozens more simply perished. Who is he to say that a life of slavery, of sexual abuse, of being treated as property is better than dying? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, maybe it depends on who you are. But it certainly isn't so simple as to say "in fact, these children are lucky to be slaves, because the only other option for them is death." Targeting death as the very worst possible outcome is in itself a very western attitude.
Interfering in any problem, whether it be micro or macro, always carries with it the possibility of making things worse. Its important to recognize that. But I can not, I will not believe that doing nothing is the best possible option.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)