Episode 8: Working with Trauma
Dr. Patricia Omidian is a medical anthropologist and international development consultant. She is also the co-founder of Focusing Initiatives International, an international NGO that supports the development of community wellness programs and trains trainers and local practitioners in public health approached to wellness and trauma healing. She has many years of international experience primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan working with different organizations including Save the Children, WHO, IRC and more on research and evaluation, community health, social reintegration, peace building, psychosocial wellness and education. She joins us from Oregon, USA.
She speaks to us about:
ethnographic methods
addressing the layers of intergenerational war time and refugee experience related trauma
cultural modalities of healing
the concept of safety
root causes of social issues - and much more.
Transcript
Intro: Talk therapy was a very difficult thing because people have so much privacy. Information can not be shared outside the family. It’s the family unit that maintains security and information can’t go beyond that. If I think about a woman who has been raped, in much of Afghanistan and Pakistan, if anybody finds about that, she is dead. She will be blamed. It is shame on the family.
Safa: Hello and welcome back to the Rethinking Development Podcast. My name is Safa and I’ll be your host as we speak with and learn from development practitioners of all ages and affiliations around the world. Each week, we aim to rethink ethical behaviour and best practices through the lived experiences and personal reflections off different practitioners. Our guest today is Dr Patricia Omidian. Dr Patricia Omidian is a medical anthropologist, international development consultant, co-founder of Focusing Initiatives International, a certified focusing trainer and an author. She has many years of international experience, primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan, working with different organizations, including Save the Children, IRC, in academia and more on research and evaluation, community health, social reintegration, psychosocial wellness and education and peace building. She is the co-founder and co-director of Focusing International, which is an international NGO that supports the development of community wellness programs and trains trainers and local practitioners in public health approaches to wellness and trauma healing. She offers workshops and lectures on focussing techniques and other various positive psychology techniques in the context of trauma and wellness internationally, Dr Omidian, thank you so much for speaking with us today.
Patricia: Wow, thank you for having me.
Safa: You are a medical anthropologist by training, and you’ve spent many years working in conflict regions — in Afghanistan. Could you tell us how your interest and commitment to the social issue of psychosocial wellbeing grew and maybe some of the first experiences you had that made you feel particularly committed to this issue?
Patricia: Thank you. Actually, my interest in community mental health began prior to my work on my PhD when we sponsored a refugee family from Afghanistan to the United States and helped them settle into the community where they were going to be living. And I saw the kinds of issues they were dealing with that were layered on top of their wartime experiences, their refugee experiences. So it was trauma built on trauma and it varied by generation. Then, when I was working on my PhD with the Afghan refugee community in the United States, I had begun looking at mental illness and trauma, and because I was interviewing people who had been tortured I started really suffering myself and realized how critical self care was and how I couldn’t continue focusing on all of the negatives. And I started looking at how the Afghans themselves were finding wellness within their own community and what were the culturally based ways of healing. So I was shifting myself intellectually into a positive approach. What does work? If we know all of this doesn’t work, what does work? And so that became the impetus for my work in communities, in helping communities recover in a culturally appropriate way. So my anthropology and my own psychological perspective, came together to look at healing and wellness.
Safa: Mhm, I see and at that time, as you spoke with and tried to learn about the culturally appropriate ways that Afghans themselves responded to the various layers of trauma in their families and in their communities — what were some of the tools or resources that you found worked well for them? And what did you learn from that process?
Patricia: Well, what became very clear very quickly was the Western model of individuation and self actualization was contrary to their own cultural perspective and their own community perspectives. And I had to understand how wellness was defined by them. So, for example, to be able to make your own decisions and step out sort of into the world as an individual was not a goal. The goal really was how are we well together rather than how am I well by myself? And it really came through a lot of observation and refining over the years. I saw the value of their spiritual connection — not religion as much as the spiritual, that inner connectedness to something larger in themselves. And for the Afghans it was very clear and they often spoke about how the trauma of war was a shared trauma that was impersonal. It wasn’t like oh the war was after me. The war effected all of us. And so that sharedness made responses to the war trauma more acceptable in the community. And so healing became more possible. It was easier to find ways to help them heal within their own context because they didn’t take that personally. The areas they took personally — if I asked an Afghan, what’s the worst thing that ever happened to you in your life? They never said war. It was always something in the family, something from childhood. Some interpersonal betrayal. That was the worst memory they held. And that really helped me understand and helped us together develop programming that would help healing.
Safa: I see, very interesting. And as you started to think of ways that you could apply self care tools or these healing resources to the international development or aid community — what was that process like?
Patricia: Well, because I’m an anthropologist my first step in any process is to go in and observe. And to ask questions. So what are you doing? Why are you doing that? This is what I’m seeing. What does this mean to you? And so it was really from a bottom up approach, and I think one of the ways it solidified so nicely was when Dr Ken Miller and I work together in maybe it was 2004 or 5 in Afghanistan, and we started just asking people. So tell us about people who are not thriving, who have been through trauma and are not thriving? And how do you know they’re not? And then tell us about people who went through trauma and are thriving, and how do you know that? And that really gave us a solid data set of what people are doing, what it means to them and that helped build programs. But I think on all the programs that I have been involved with, it’s always been a collaborative process between the local community and the knowledge that I bring in, adapted and reformed and redefined or refrained into their own cultural understanding.
Safa: Mhm, as you say, the communities that you’ve worked in or that different international development practitioners serve in, they can be traumatic environments which can cause trauma not just for the communities that are being served or the local participants, but also the practitioners themselves. Can you speak to us a bit about the differences that you’ve witnessed in terms of the resource available? Or the personal experiences of national staff members versus international staff members?
Patricia: Sure, and I think that’s one of the areas that still needs a lot of work in international aid and humanitarian efforts. There is a real understanding now that international staff going into areas are experiencing trauma — not just secondary but primary. And it could be very difficult. I know for me, nothing haunts me more than being handed a starving baby. That is an image that I carry and it’s overwhelming. So international agencies often bring in therapy programs or try to find ways to really help international staff. There is some movement to help national staff, but I think it’s very, very weak and it is at the cost of the wellness of the local aid workers. And it’s an area that I’m particularly distressed by. I know when I was working in Afghanistan and we were at an ACBAR meeting, a coordination meeting of all the NGOs trying to bring humanitarian aid there, there had been a very violent attack against clinics in the north and some of the agencies completely pulled out, others pulled back, and were going to send their staff in after things calm down. Because of the nature of a lot of developing countries there are areas where individuals may not be safe if they have to travel to an area outside of their home area because they don’t have their own social resources, social connections to keep them safe. And international agencies don’t always take that into account. The other thing they don’t take into account that for internationals — we have a passion for this work, we are doing this not necessarily for the money, but because we have an inner mission in life. But a lot of local staff are working because they have to support their family. And these internationally funded jobs are often highest paid. They may pay double or triple what a government job would pay, so they are lucrative in the local context. But this individual may be supporting 20 family members. That may be the only economic provider for a very large extended family. So there is an economic compulsion to work maybe, rather than an inner desire to do good. It doesn’t make the person bad. It just means the motivations are different. And yet international agencies will not always recognize the physical danger that local staff may be under by working in an area that is not their own area. And in one, this one incident that I’m remembering, one of the heads of agency said “well, the staff just don’t want to go because they’ve got a better job offer some where else,”rather than hearing their staff say I don’t feel safe. And in a recent situation in Uganda, the aid worker was actually told by an international staff person, this local Ugandan humanitarian worker was told by an international supervisor “well, you’re just trying not to work. It’s not because these things have gone wrong. You just don’t wanna follow up on your job.” And he was so frustrated he actually was in contact with me and we had to work through his emotional pain at not being heard by his own supervisor that he was in a difficult situation.
Safa: Yes, that’s that’s very unjust and very difficult to deal with. There are so many examples of this kind of experiences and these kind of behaviours — when you speak about trauma, as you say for everyone, there’s a different threshold or different sensitivities, different experiences. What might be traumatic to one person might not be for another. So in terms of creating programs or providing trainings and tools — how do you approach this work? Bearing in mind the differences and the varied experiences that that exist within a group for example?
Patricia: I really start with the group through conversations, listening to their needs. When I worked in Africa on Ebola, it was at the height of West African — I was in Liberia and it was in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. I literally with my local team, we would go into a village and we would make sure that villagers felt safe from us and that we were safe in case somebody there had Ebola. Our job really was — we sat down and we listened. We basically said, what do you need to tell us? What do we need to hear from you? We would spend hours listening and recording what they said. And when they were done, we could say, OK, what do you need from us? And based on that we moved forward. I think the key to this work is listening. Once people feel heard change can happen. I am not interested in making sure a particular program gets run, which can actually get me in trouble with donors sometimes, but it’s based on the needs of the community, not my need as an outsider. But what I found interesting in this is when we were doing that one study with but with Dr Miller. One of the interesting things we found was that when men were trying to identify other men they knew who had been through trauma and were not doing well, they would say, well, they beat their wives or there’s violence in the family. And that was a marker in Afghanistan of a family not doing well and the man being traumatized. And yet, if you walked in and said, beating your wife is bad, they would say, oh, but we’re allowed to. That’s our right. Yet when we interviewed people about, how do you know someone’s not? Well, we’ll beating their wife is a sign. So here’s the difference between something that is culturally sort of an untouchable topic but socially, they knew it wasn’t the best thing to do. And in fact, that was the door we had to helping men deal with anger in a way that didn’t cause violence. They actually would come to us and say help me, this is not what I want to do. They came to us for that help rather than us saying you need to stop doing that. When an outsider comes in and says “you need to” — it creates friction. But when the locals could say this is what we need help on, then the door’s open.
Safa: What a great example. One word that often comes up in these types of conversation is feeling safe and safe spaces and the need for safety. But in unsafe environments, how do you create safety or a sense of safety? Or could you speak to us about your experiences with the process of creating safe spaces?
Patricia: (Laughs) oh, yeah, the safe space is very often an illusion. I remember when I was working early on in Afghanistan on self care and community care. I would have this one activity that we called a safe calm place. And I would ask people to imagine a safe, calm place, and the response was almost always there is no such thing. I can’t even imagine it. And so we would have people visualize an imaginary place and then bring that inside them, engage inside in comfort in an exclusion of that outside reality so that they could become grounded in their own bodies. And it was only inside themselves that they would actually find safety. And then, through their spiritual sense in Afghanistan of where do you find the divine? It would be inside, and so that gave more strength to an inner place of calmness. And from that, then they could engage again outside with community that may not be safe. One of the other things we found that was very powerful is talk therapy was a very difficult thing because people have so much privacy. Information cannot be shared outside the family. It’s the family unit that maintains security and information can’t go beyond that. If I think about a woman who’s been raped in much of Pakistan and Afghanistan, if anybody finds out about that, she’s dead. She will be blamed. It’s shame on the family. So that information of despair and shame and trauma can’t be shared verbally. So we have ways and we use focusing to do this, which isn an inner practice of being with whatever trauma you have. But rather than doing it in a talk therapy situation people can transform it through metaphors, which Afghans love to use anyway. They’re all poets. They use metaphor to engage that information and heal the places of pain. They don’t have to share anything outside. So safety becomes inner process where they then can engage in the community.
Safa: Right, I see. So it’s more of the inner landscape that’s used as a tool for grounding.
Patricia: Yes.
Safa: You’ve also done work with children in conflict. Could you perhaps tell us more about the specificities or the specific environment that is necessary for working with children who have experienced trauma and what you think the international development community or the humanitarian aid community needs to do more work on or better work on in terms of responding to childhood trauma?
Patricia: Yeah, I think Jo de Berry had the best work on that in Afghanistan. Her study showed that the best way to help the children is to help their care givers and let the caregivers help children. I think child safe spaces are critical. Children have to play, and they will play even if it’s a minefield they will go there and play. They are curious. How do you promote their curiosity? I think, though in the end, helping children process what they’ve been through. So it’s a duel effort when working with children. One is to really help the caregivers. Both their parents, their family, their teachers, if they’re in school, understand how to help the children process things and play. And then helping the children themselves process through play, through art, through poetry, whatever means are there that they can get in touch with and know that their reactions are fine. I think the biggest thing beyond that is learning that you can listen to children. And my friend in Uganda, Daniel, has a wonderful story of how he was using an art project for children and having them draw something about their wanting in life. What would they like? You know, children were drawing happy homes and playgrounds and this one girl drew a picture of an elephant I think it was stepping on a woman’s head and he sat down with her and and talked to her and just listen to her story, and she wanted this elephant to kill her stepmother and it turns out her stepmother was abusing her in terms of workload and general treatment and in a way that was very damaging to the child physically, like having to carry two heavy loads of water and things and it was so traumatic for the child. And so his listening to this child and hearing this child’s story, he was able to give this child help so that she was removed from that physically damaging and abusive environment by UNHCR. It was through the process of listening to this child. What was an art project that led to listening that led to rescuing. And I think that’s how you work with children. Whatever the activity is can really point you to when you need to really deeply listen.
Safa: Mhm. That’s such a great example and powerful imagery. When you think about social change and what it takes to achieve social change, not just on an individual level, but socially, what in your experience works best? There’s so many different methods and approaches, and especially in the sector, there’s so many different techniques used and different theories and ideas — from your perspective, what you’ve experienced, what do you think is one of the better ways to approach the desire to achieve positive social change or social impact?
Patricia: It’s got to come, you know — you’re right- there are so many different models. One of the favorite ones right now is mindfulness. There’s all these peace building models, reconciliation model. I think anything that is successful has at its core, an openness to what the community can do in positive ways and a strong component of listening. There isn’t a single model that will work everywhere. But there are some techniques that allow any community to solve its problems in a peaceful way, because people want to live in a way that their families and children can thrive. And when we recognize that and we don’t worry about the surface trappings, but we really get down and let the community find their own solutions, that’s what will work, and that is what will be sustainable. Programs in Afghanistan — because we developed it with the Afghans, the Afghans really did the hard work. They used imagery metaphors, hadiths from the Koran, local traditions that were positive and important to them, they’re sustainable. And after I left, there was a German woman who went in and evaluated some of the programs I developed and found that nobody traced it back to me. When she said, where does this come from everybody said oh its our tradition. That’s when you know it’s successful. When somebody says, Oh, it’s from you know, Canada or it’s from the US, this person came and taught us. I’m not sure thats successful. But when people say, oh it’s us, that’s the key. There was this wonderful model brought in to and adapted in Liberia that took a local tradition of community problem solving and deepened it so that there was deeper listening and then communal positive responses back toward the individuals who have been so traumatized because of Ebola. So it’s sustainable. It looks completely local. It is absolutely built on what they already do. You know, it’s sustainable. It’s doable. That’s where it successful. And that’s where all of these tools — they have great techniques that once adapted may work. But they have to be a adapted.
Safa: Right, that’s the key point, that it becomes embedded and as with that story that people can say it’s our tradition now.
Patricia: As it always was. They say, oh this is how we always should be.This is how we always work. They point back to Jalaluddin Rumi, the famous ,you know, Sufi poet who, you know, was born in Afghanistan — oh this was ours. So when you can say that that the healing technique traces back to, you know, a millennia old poet, you know you got it.
Safa: (Laughs) Absolutely. There’s not much more historical than Rumi.
Patricia: Exactly.
Safa: When you think of the international development sector, I know that the work that you do in terms of healing and wellbeing within communities and that is on one side. But when you think of the broader international development sector and you think about perhaps some of the ethical issues that bother you or some of the perhaps exploitations that occur, what are your thoughts about those aspect of the sector?
Patricia: Yeah. We make money off of war, and then we make money off the healing of war. And as long as we fail to address the root causes, we will continue this need for international aid.
Safa: You mention the root causes. For you what are some of these root causes that are not being addressed enough?
Patricia: I think climate change. If I even look at Afghanistan it has been — war devastates the environment. It uproots people. It destroys water systems. The creation of mass population movements that disrupt new areas of agriculture or grazing lands. Then you add climate change, where temperatures and precipitation are rapidly changing. I see population movement problems growing in the future. I think a lot of the current wars, even though they use religion or politics as their excuse, I think they’re actually about more fundamental issues, hunger and population pressures. I think we’re going to get worse now, you know, not better. I think a lot of the problems that are behind Syria, for instance, have to do with water and loss of farmlands that were behind, you know, before the before, before the battles.
Safa: Does your commitment to focusing as a tool and the commitment to wellness work that you do — does that come from the belief that, you know, individual healing is necessary for more societal healing?
Patricia: Yeah but its not a first per se. It’s at at the same time as. One of the things that was very clear to me when I was in Afghanistan running the AFC office was that — and AFC is primarily about peace building as its bottom layer foundation although it does a lot of other work. For me if we didn’t start help individuals heal and their families heal, there was no way we were going to get community healing. And there was no way we were gonna find any level of peace building. And in fact, violence starts in the home. And it is shared at the community level. So yeah, for me, it was how do we heal the community and the individual at the same time so that they themselves can answer their economic, social, nutritional, you know, so they can start meeting some of their own needs and feel that they have the strength to do that.
Safa: Right, so they go hand in hand.
Patricia: They really go hand in hand.
Safa: In some of your anthropological articles you speak about, you know, the concept of militarized anthropology and the interface between aid work and the military. Could you speak to us a bit about those boundaries and the ethical issues that you’ve come across as you witnessed this type of work in Afghanistan or different countries.
Patricia: It is the way I was trained as an anthropologist was that my first loyalty is to the people I study not the donor, not the government, mine or theirs, but to the actual people I study. That somehow if they don’t have the voice going up, I could be the voice, where I can carry their voice forward. But anthropology in both European and New World anthropology has often been a tool of governments to find ways to suppress people, solve wars, promote colonialism, and so that awareness of how can I not be part of that was very important to me. At the same time I was working in Afghanistan at the level of community and wanting to move community voices forward. The US hired anthropologists or social scientists to help them figure out how to be better at the military side. And it’s, for me, it’s so wrong. For one thing, there’s no way you walk into a community as an anthropologist and in a short time know actually what’s going on, because what you see isn’t necessarily what’s actually happening. One of the agencies I worked with early on — because I speak some of the local language , the donor had me, you know, I was in there working on behalf of a donor doing evaluation processes for this Afghan local NGO. And this was during the Taliban era before 2001. As I was in that community of this aid organization, I quickly realized, oh, the head of agency and the deputy director are husband wife and the finance person is a brother and the medical director is a brother and head of HR is a sister. You know, it was a family affair. It was a family business, and it was doing excellent work. And when I was talking to the donors and writing my report, they didn’t know this was a family business. I had to be there and hearing conversations for me to know that. So how would a military send in somebody who would instantly know what’s going on. I think also that it is about , my role is really to see what to be a critique of that military system. Not to say, oh, this is how you do it better but oh my gosh, this is what you’re doing wrong. One of the things that came out of a 2002 study was how many women of childbearing age were dying because of military action by the European groups coming in — European Americans coalition. So that needed to be said. I don’t think it’s the job of an anthropologist to help suppress people.
Safa: Absolutely. Have you found it challenging to maintain a commitment to do no harm in in your work? I mean, I think that most people who do social justice work or international development programs and projects — they are mostly, you know, motivated by a desire to contribute positively to social change. But when that doesn’t happen, when we inevitably — a situation comes up where we do cause harm. How do you think we can better respond to those circumstances and situations? How can we be better equipped to acknowledge and more respectfully respond to those situations?
Patricia: Yeah. Oh, do no harm is at the forefront, and it’s very difficult because sometimes it’s which group am I gonna make sure there’s no harm done to? Because by protecting one, I may hurt another. Field work and working in war zones or even post war zones or Ebola or humanitarian drought disaster, you know, these are really tough times where we’re not necessarily equipped to know what the right answer is, and there may actually be no right answer. It’s like some of the game theory stuff that you may, you know, practice in college. It doesn’t mean there really is a right answer, and you have to live with that answer that you choose. And I write about it in my book ‘When Bamboo Bloom’ that we were in Herat and it was during the Taliban time, we were at a camp of displaced people, an IDP camp, and this one family said, prove you care. Take our you know, our sister, daughter, wife to a hospital. You have a car, you need to take her. And there was a rule at that time that Taliban absolutely forbade Afghan women to be in international vehicles, particularly with — you know women were not allowed to drive and they couldn’t be with a non family male at all. So they weren’t, we weren’t allowed by Taliban to take her. And I carried with me the guilt of not taking that woman. And it was, and I had that guilt in me for years, actually, until I wrote that book and was going through my old notes and found I wasn’t the one that made the decision. And yet I carried the guilt of leaving that behind. I don’t know if she lived or died, but had we taken her we had to go past several Taliban check posts and the the male doctors with me, Afghan doctors in the vehicle could have been imprisoned or worse, had we take her. So it was a choice of who might die.
Safa: It’s almost an impossible decision. Absolutely, it’s very hard.
Patricia: And that do no harm, yes. And it’s not necessarily- may not actually be the question.
Safa: Could you tell us about the process of writing ‘When bamboo Blooms’, your book about your time in Afghanistan?
Patricia: Yeah, boy, that was, that was an amazing writing experience. Its a small book. It’s written for general audience. It’s not an academic tone. I decided to write it, and I spoke to a publisher who got excited about it. And so in November, I sent the prospectus, you know, the book summary idea and was accepted. In February I sent them the draft, and the following October, it was published. It came out — it was very painful, right? One of the things I wanted to make sure it contained were those dilemmas, the kind of what might you do in that situation? Because this work we do doesn’t come with a field guide that works across every situation.
Safa: Absolutely. When you write or you speak about your experiences, do you have a strong sense of responsibility to speak about the realities that you witness and you were part of in a very, would you say critical way, or how would you characterize the responsibility that you might feel?
Patricia: I still feel a deep responsibility to the communities with whom I’ve worked. Although I’ve met a lot of government people that I liked personally in these different countries, I still feel it’s the community that I want to speak for and about and if possible, give them the voice themselves to do it. There is a book I would love to write about my years living in Kabul. And I haven’t done that because too many people might know who I’m talking about in the story. And I want to be very careful because of the political situation there now, not to put anybody in danger. So that do no harm can actually keep me from writing.
Safa: Right, absolutely. That might be the safest way to approach it for now.
Patricia: I have a friend from years ago who did her fieldwork in Tunisia, and she had to wait for some political person to die before she could actually publish her dissertation.
Safa: Wow.
Patricia: And she waited 20 years so you know, one has to be careful. Do no harm comes first.
Safa: You’ve done a lot of teaching and research and work in academia, in different roles and in different countries. Could you tell us about what you think the role of academics and researchers can be when it comes to these issues or even when it comes to collaborating with the international development sector?
Patricia: I think one of my biggest complaints about that is that, yeah, there’s a lot of good stuff coming out of the West, out of the Global North and the Global North needs to learn from the Global South. It’s not a one way street, although academic seem to see it that way. And when I’m working in these different places, I think one of the things I want my students there to understand is we need to learn from them. They don’t need to copy what we’re doing. They need to develop an organic indigenous model for much of what we look at, especially around psychology and the social sciences. There are some places around the world who are doing that very well. But when I work with people in Pakistan, I don’t want to see — for instance they’ll do a psychological study where they want to prove that something that worked in the West worked in Pakistan and my enthusiasm toward them is why, you know- what would work better? What should it be instead? What would work best for your community? I spend a lot of time in global mental health critiquing it, that maybe the Western psychological model of care and feeling isn’t the best when you’ve got 200 million people and only 200 or 300 psychologists and the possible numbers of people needing something is much greater, how can we, from a public health approach, a preventive approach, do more community care, more prevention, more self care and self care meaning community care. You know, how can we flip it? I guess so that we are not not in a colonial sense, taking from the global south but actually learning from the global south.
Safa: Mhm, definitely. When you think about what success means to you or — I know every project is different. But how have you measured or come to terms with the impact or the final results of a particular project or professional stage in your career? How have you come to define you know, the word success?
Patricia: I don’t think I have. I’m still a work in process. I think all of this is process. I don’t think there is an end stage. Success feels like it might be an end stage. I’m not there yet.
Safa: Okay.
Patricia: I may never get there. I won’t get there.
Safa: Is there a part of your work that you feel most proud of?
Patricia:(Laughs) That’s kind of like that question. I think I am proud every time somebody with whom I worked just shined, you know, that they’re extraordinary people. There’s one student I had back in ’97, ’98 in Pakistan when I was a Fullbrighter and this guy is an advocate for child rights and child protection and speaks internationally. And I’m not going to say I’m a success, I just feel like gosh I got to know this person when he was just starting to ask the questions, you know, I mean, he is wow. You know there’s people like that I know around the world that they touched my life, and I think that feels like the things I’m proud of us, it’s not what I did, it’s what they’re doing and they’ve done. But wow, I got to know them. You know that those are the types of things that bring me real joy.
Safa: Mhm, that’s great. Yeah. Are there any new approaches or tools that — I know that you’re quite committed to the focusing method, but are there any new tools or approaches other than that, or related to that, that you think that international development workers or others just generally should be exposed to or trained in or you see as being very helpful in terms of the work that is done and the future?
Patricia: Oh, I can think of two just right off the top of my head. One of them is positive deviants. I absolutely love positive deviants.It was developed by the Sternins back in the ’90s maybe in Vietnam. It’s this brilliant simple process of going in and with the community, finding what they’ve already done to solve whatever problem it is because their basic premise is somebody local has already solved the problem. And it’s absolutely true. It was true with Ebola. Liberia proved that you actually could solve much of the Ebola crisis at the community level by community actors who have already figured it out. And if you look at the numbers, it really shows that that is true. Positive deviants, there’s a website, you just Google it. It’s there. One of the other ones I really like is dynamic facilitation, and it’s this wonderful way, I feel like it’s taking focusing out of the internal self processing realm into a community processing realm where you’re listening to each community member all the way through. And it’s the community that sees what’s going on and solves their own problems. And I’ve used it in very complex settings and watched just a shift in the whole room where the problems suddenly becomes solvable and solved. So I think, yeah, there’s a lot of really good tools out there. And I think as aid workers, local people learning more about these, adapting them, shifting them, changing them, redefining them, making it their own and then using, them having them in the toolbox. What I don’t like is the way donors like to fund pilot projects and as soon as a pilot project is absolutely successful, it will be dropped. Success guarantee it will no longer be funded, and that would be the opposite side, the frustrations.
Safa: Right, because it doesn’t allow it to continue to grow and flourish.
Patricia: Yeah, and institutional memory is only as long as the aid worker is there to remember it. And the shift of turn and everything has to be new and new name on it.
Safa: Mmm. Exactly. Yeah, a lot of times projects are repeated with a gap of a few years between them. Just because the institutional memory has been lost.
Patricia: Yeah.
Safa: Do you have any heroes in this work or in this sector? People that really inspire you and give you give you hope for the future or in terms of achieving positive impact?
Patricia: I think most of my heroes have really been local. They aren’t the names that make it into academic press or books or magazines. It’s really, you know, and I’m terrible with names so that’s a problem. The woman in Liberia who figured out how to care for 23 family members and never catch Ebola herself and used only local materials that costs no more than $5. Or the woman in Afghanistan who was absolutely illiterate and yet absolutely understood human nature and solved numerous community problems. In every country there’s, you know, it’s the local people, the Wakil-e-gozar, the man in Afghanistan who just picked himself up, shook himself off and continued to work for his community in spite of whatever was there. You know, lots of heroes that I meet that I am absolutely in awe of.
Safa: Do you find that the motivation you had when you first started your career has changed? Or is the same or or what drives you in your work at this stage?
Patricia: I think the motivation is probably the same but how I want to manage it has shifted as I’m aging. And there’s also a feeling that I want more people out there doing this kind of work and so looking for ways to connect. I think one of my other motivations is how do we get the global south talking to the global south? The man in Ecuador who, Mr Hernandez, who does this amazing work, and he’s taking it out that he needs to talk to people in Uganda and in Pakistan, you know, how do we get those voices connected? I would like to see if maybe in the future there’s more that connection of that kind of expertise.
Safa: Very interesting and very necessary. Absolutely. Are there any final thoughts you’ve had, whether it’s on your own work or the industry or any ethical issues, anything else you think that is important for you to share?
Patricia: I’ll probably think of it in about 20 minutes. I’m really good at after thoughts. (Laughs).
Safa: (Laughs) No worries, that’s perfectly fine. So I would just like to thank you so much for speaking with us today and sharing your thoughts and your reflections. It’s been very interesting and thought provoking, these are all such very important issues and it’s great to hear from your personal experiences. So thank you.
Patricia: Thank you very much.
Patricia: Thank you. Also to our listeners. To keep up with our weekly podcast, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify and Google podcast platforms. You can also rate and review our episodes and leave your feedback. You can also follow us on instagram where our handle is @rethinkingdevelopment. And if you have any listener questions that you would like me to ask our future guests, please feel free to email them to us at. I look forward to continuing similar conversations with you all in the weeks to come. Until then, take care.
