Summary:
In Healing From War (HFW) workshops there are groups of co-counselors from 10 to 20 countries. Much of what happens is about these groups and the feelings they have towards each other. That can raise some re stimulations for people who are the only ones from their countries.
People from the same country can support each other in many ways. They may know each other from local RC activities, they may have traveled together to the workshop, and they have a nominated Country Coordinator who offers leadership and reference. Those who were born and raised in that country enjoy yet another layer of support. For those who share a native language with people from their country, there is yet another layer.
People who are the only ones from their countries lack that kind of support, and may want to find it elsewhere. That is especially true if their native language is unique to that country. That is why there is a team, whose job is to offer that support.
Text:
This year, I was assigned the role of thinking well about persons who are only ones from their countries, in one of the Healing From War (HFW) workshops that the RC community is having in Poland. This is the second time that I get to do this job. It had been previously labeled “thinking well about people who are only ones from their nation”, which raised some doubts for some co-counselors. Indeed, identifying with a nation can sometimes be challenging. Identifying as coming from a certain country might be less challenging.
I think that persons in this constituency face unique challenges, and thus, it makes sense to have a group that thinks about them well and offer support to them. I have not been to any workshop outside my country other than the HFW workshops in Poland, but based on what I hear from others, I deduce that our workshops are quite unique in the number of countries that are represented. There are groups of attendants from 10-20 countries, each group consisting of less than 10 persons from the same country. This is quite different from workshops in which a vast majority of the attendants are from the hosting country, with only a few people from other countries.
This is not a coincidence. The HFW workshops are sought to be a place where co-counselors from different countries get to look at distresses they carry with regards to people from other countries, countries with which their country had wars. Therefore, a lot is happening with respect to countries. If you are from Wigelia, then you may get to be invited to topic groups and topic tables for Wigelians, you may hear about activities for allies to Wigelians, and in creativity night, there will probably be a gig by the Wigelian group. But if you are the only person from Wigelia, all that will probably not happen, and that might re stimulate some old early recordings of isolation!
Moreover, if you are a part of a group of co-counselors who are from Wigelia, then there is one person who was assigned as country coordinator for Wigelia. That person is responsible to reference the other co-counselors from Wigelia, make sure that things go well for them in the workshop. That person is a contact point for Wigelians with the leader and with the organizers of the workshop. A country coordinator is also someone you can also contact with a re stimulation you might pick up. But not if you are the only one from your country, because then, you do not have a country coordinator! So there’s another challenge.
I can think of some other advantages in being part of a group of co-counselors from one’s country. There may be co-counselors in that group whom you know well from local workshops. You may have traveled to Poland with them and go back home with them. These technicalities could contradict isolation in certain ways. If you are the only one from your country, you have not got that either.
These challenges are there for people who are only ones from their countries, regardless of whether they were born in those countries, regardless of how many years they live in them, regardless of their feelings of belonging to them. I’d imagine that it is somewhat like being an RCer outside of an organized area.
If you are the only one from your country and your native language is unique to that country, there is yet another challenge for you. It is helpful to have someone around who grew up in your culture and speaks your native language. It has been suggested in RC, that a person’s mind operates best on that person’s native language. A lot of thinking is being put in HFW workshops so that all attendants will have an equal access to the workshop’s resources, regardless of whether their native language is a dominant language (namely, English), or they are the only ones in the workshop with that native language.
There is a different team in the workshop, whose role is to think well about language liberation. There is an intersection between the roles, when it comes to supporting co-counselors who are both the only ones from their countries and the only ones with their native languages. I think that it makes sense for co-counselors with that double challenge to have twice as many teams to support them 🙂
I hope that my counting of challenges has not discouraged anyone!
My intention is to let you know that you do not have to handle those challenges alone, that you have got us to be there for you.
My path to re-emergence 