Building the Resilient Community

Lessons from the Lost Boys of Sudan

M. Jan Holton

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781608992454
  9781498212410
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621892724
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

How do some communities around the world that suffer outrageous violence and trauma manage, with few outside resources, not only to survive, but to thrive? September 11, the devastation of hurricane Katrina, school shootings, and other events of community violence and trauma have taught us, as a nation and a church, about the fundamental importance of building a caring community that fosters resilience and hope.   Building the Resilient Community takes a refreshing turn of perspective by giving priority not only to the formally educated voices of the West but to those among the most marginalized and invisible in the world: refugees. Based on ethnographic research in Kakuma Refugee Camp and remote villages of southern Sudan, Holton presents a communal case study of a group of devoutly Christian refugees known as the Lost Boys of Sudan and asks the question, Might they have something to teach us about being a resilient community?   As Holton investigates their deeply embedded cultural and religious beliefs that nurture a profound sense of responsibility toward others, we find a communal relationship that reflects a unique sense of care and obligation. This deep frame for communal care breaks through as the root of a remarkable faith narrative that serves to help mitigate symptoms of trauma and to undergird resilience, and may do the same for us.

1

Shifting Perspectives in Pastoral Theology

---

When one has nothing in this desolate place the choice is simple: believe in a God who will provide or give oneself over to despair. The Dinka I have met in Southern Sudan have decided to believe in a God who, against all odds, will provide. Already in this small outpost town, there are more than twenty-five churches. Not one has anything but a bare earthen floor or walls made of anything but mud. Some have shiny corrugated aluminum roofs strong enough to withstand the long rainy season; others make do with patchwork plastic or a roof woven together like a bird’s nest that must be replaced every dry season. There are no brass crosses to sit atop shiny altars but only a drum and offering basket to take center stage. Have no doubt, though, these are proud houses of worship for hundreds if not thousands on Sunday morning. We make our way to the church by following a sea of colored plastic chairs bobbing atop the heads of tall dark-skinned Dinka. We forgot to bring our chairs. No matter, we are embarrassingly ushered forward to visitors’ seats in the front. So much for the anonymity of the back pew! I feel shabby in my dusty boots and field clothes compared to the clean pressed shirts and brightly colored African dresses with head-scarves. The overflow listens from outside the church and only nursing mothers move inside when the rains begin. They have come to hear the Word and hear it they will. Only in Word and prayer do they find hope for another day.

—Field notes from Bor, Sudan

From the earliest days of my career as an academic, I have been pursuing the question of trauma and resilience in communities afflicted with violence and disaster. How, I ask, can people in utterly devastating circumstances manage not only to persevere but even to thrive? I recall the woman in August of 1996 standing in front of a block of buildings decimated by the shelling in Sarajevo—only a façade stood to reveal what used to be a row of shops and apartments. Steadily, she swept the dust from a large square portion of the sidewalk in front of the mine-filled rubble. Why? Was this madness at work or some small effort to bring order to the chaos of war’s aftermath? Elsewhere, in the Palestinian village of Samu in late 1996, how did the children make sense of the armed soldiers patrolling the streets under full “lockdown”—shut off from the world and all deliveries of food and water? On yet another continent, how did the father in Estelí, Nicaragua, who watched his son die after being buried nearly to the neck in a mudslide after Hurricane Mitch in 1998, rally to provide for and comfort the living children still by his side? And then there are the children of Sudan, whom we will meet shortly. There is no shortage of tragedy from war and natural disaster around the globe. Though the above are only brief anecdotal glimpses of the resilience I have encountered, they speak to what compels me toward the research I do.

In each of these cases, I witnessed a powerful ability of people to overcome circumstances that could have just as easily rendered them immobilized and helpless. They focused, instead, on feeding their families, rebuilding their homes, finding work, getting married, and having children. In some cases, the violence continued in one form or another. But they pressed on. It was as if no one told them they were supposed to be undone by the terrible things they had experienced. The resilience I witnessed, interestingly enough, did not preclude many from also experiencing what we would call traumatic symptoms, some of which may have caused periods of distress. Unfortunately, it was these symptoms only upon which psychosocial service agencies and other medical personnel focused.

When focusing on the pathology of trauma, Western care professionals pay little heed to the resources for resilience. A recent conversation with a medical colleague concerning informed consent among refugees from war provides a glimpse into the thinking behind psychological care in communities of other (non-Western) cultures. She stated that the Dinka, for example, are not informed enough (implying lack of Western medical knowledge) to give consent; after all, they don’t know about posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and don’t realize what may happen if they start talking about past events. The assumption here, of course, is that individuals who have lived under conditions of war for two decades don’t understand what might happen if they talk about what they have experienced, or, more important, that they lack the ability to make a judgment about whether it would cause them harm to do so. It never occurred to her that people living at war for twenty years may actually know more than she about what happens when one talks about these difficult things. In my experience, this attitude is pervasive and trickles down through aid programs so that the refugee experience is dismissed in favor of Western biomedical paradigms.

In remote communities and refugee camps, a common strategy of care in response to trauma has been to train laypersons to practice basic counseling skills. These skills are specifically oriented toward the symptoms of Western definitions of posttraumatic stress disorder. Little or no attention is given to aspects of community or faith, both of which are essential resources in many cultural contexts. Though training booklets given out during my visit to Nicaragua, for example, had been translated into Spanish, the curriculum gave scant attention to any other aspect of the context in which it was applied. In Kakuma refugee camp (Kenya), training for this method of individually focused talk “therapy” also overlooked significant aspects of community, faith, and tradition unique to Sudan and the Dinka.

Indeed, community and faith are two significant sources of resilience that become quick casualties of Western approaches to healing. In Central American and African contexts especially, the effects of violent conflict or disaster are felt most deeply within the communal structure. Members of the community often express loss in terms of how it relates to family, clan, and neighbor; the individual stands primarily as an extension of these. In this context, highly individualistic therapeutic strategies make little sense; nonetheless, aid organizations continue to import them. Psychosocial professionals, in general, give little regard to religious faith as part of the treatment strategy for trauma among refugees, yet it is one of the most consistent resources for nearly all of the individuals and communities I visited. So, how can pastoral theology help address this lack of attention to cultural context in the treatment of trauma?

I have approached this study of the Lost Boys through a culturally-critical pastoral theological method in an effort to broker a better understanding of how this community has acted to mitigate the sometimes debilitating psychological symptoms associated with what is often diagnosed as PTSD. Here I will bring together three lenses (the cultural critique of anthropology, theology, and psychology) through which to sharpen a pastoral theological focus on the Lost Boy community and traumatic experience.

Arthur Kleinman, anthropologist and psychiatrist, provides an interesting glimpse into how Western biomedical practices separate personal narrative from an illness event, thus taking it out of the context of individual lives. He has written extensively in the area of medical anthropology and has added significantly to our understanding of how what we call depression manifests itself in other cultures. Kleinman challenges the biomedical community to understand illness and healing within the context of a patient’s own cultural perspective. This emphasis on cultural narrative is of immense value in interpreting and treating refugees, who often face a multitude of physical and psychological challenges.

Kleinman contributes three important thoughts in this regard. First, in The Illness Narratives, he proposes a tripartite understanding of what is commonly known as an illness episode. Kleinman defines illness as the experience of the symptoms that include not only the physical aspects of disease but also the emotional, interpersonal, and economic consequences as well; disease denotes the biomedical interpretation of illness symptoms; and sickness is the cultural interpretation of the disease.1 The way a family member will describe the impact of a particular illness is not necessarily the same as how a physician will describe its impact as a disease.

Kleinman goes on to propose four levels of meaning behind every illness event. These include the first level, how the individual understands the symptoms of a disease in relation to his or her body, self, and society. Second is the cultural level that gives particular meaning to certain diseases and symptoms (cancer, AIDS, even PTSD). How symptoms relate to the web of relationships that make up an individual’s personal world is the third level of meaning. Finally, the fourth level is the clinical meaning of the disease—what Kleinman calls the “clinical reality.”2 These layers of meaning, as understood from the perspective of the patient, come to constitute an explanatory model of illness that is often presented, he claims, in the form of personal, or I would add communal, narrative.3 As we will see, narratives, especially faith narratives, have, indeed, become an essential source of resilience for the Dinka.

Pushing at the Boundaries

In some ways, this ethnographic study of how a group of war-ravaged Sudanese refugees find resilience through communal obligation and a shared faith narrative feels like a bit of an anomaly for the discipline of pastoral theology. And yet the two reigning paradigms in pastoral theology, the communal contextual and the intercultural, invite just such an inquiry.

In the early 1990s, John Patton proposed that pastoral care was a task for the community of faith (i.e., not reserved for ordained clergy). He compared pastoral caregivers to “mini-ethnographers” who must explore the particularities of context in every care encounter.4 Within the next decade, the intercultural paradigm also emerged and challenged pastoral theology to do the difficult work of considering the alternate worldviews and systems of influence rising from different cultures.

These conflicted feelings, that this research is both an anomaly and quite at home in pastoral theology, indicate the sense of both belonging and alienation that often occurs when one pushes against familiar boundaries in order to embrace a new perspective.

In 2006, the Society for Pastoral Theology met in Denver, Colorado, for its annual meeting. That year the theme of the study conference was violence. We visited the nearby area of Columbine—site of the horrific school shooting in 1999 that resulted in th...

Table of contents

• Building the Resilient Community
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Shifting Perspectives in Pastoral Theology
• 2 Ravaged by War
• 3 The Lost Boy Experience
• 4 Refugees and the Effects of Traumatic Experience
• 5 Building Community Resilience
• 6 A Communal Faith Narrative
• 7 Nurturing the Faith Narrative
• Bibliography
• Index