Friday, November 23, 2007
Suicide (not mine!)
Okay. So what have I (the guy) been doing, in between battling rats and bats (3 bats dead now, but we have screens on most of our windows finally!), helping raise a puppy, and reading a ton of books? Well, three main things: Teaching Information Technology (mostly Microsoft Office stuff, and typing); trying to get some traction working with local farmers getting into aquaculture (fish-farming for sale in local and international markets); and trying to lower the suicide rate. I’ll talk about that last one for a bit here.
We’re in the region of the country (10 regions in this country, the country itself the size of Idaho, 11th-largest state) with the highest suicide rate. We’re in the specific village collection that drives up the suicide rate of this region. There are four villages together on this road, about a twenty-minute bikeride across each, total population just under 2000. This is the breadbasket of the country, provides enough food for every man, woman, and child, with more for export besides. The main rice and sugar productions are mostly right around here, and the area also provides a crazy amount of fruits and vegetables. Seventh-graders struggle to read, but third-graders can have heated discussions about the exhaust pipes of tractors (no joke), and when harvest-time comes (there are two growing seasons per year here), students disappear from school in droves to help out. Okay, so there’s the basic setup, as much as you can describe a specific region in another country in one paragraph, anyway.
Out of fewer than 2000 people, there are 5-6 attempted suicides per month. I’ll say that one more time, and I’ll add in some math. 2000 people in families of about 4 – 5, so 450 families. 60+ suicide attempts per year. Think about those numbers over a 20-year span (and this problem has been ongoing. Not every attempt leads to a successful suicide, but enough do, and there are repeat-attempters as well.
And 450 nuclear families in an enclosed area means that not only does everyone know everyone, but that everybody is related to everybody else. I don’t think I’ve found a person yet that hasn’t a lost a cousin, and most have lost a brother or sister or child or parent, to suicide.
So, that’s the situation. The typical method is poisoning via farm chemicals and pesticides; there are stories of people leaving this area for the States, living there a half-dozen years, then killing themselves in the same way as people here, and for the same reasons. It’s a cultural response at this point, and people carry it with them their entire lives. The reasons most typically involve an argument with a girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse, or occasionally with a family-member. Also, the majority of attempts are men, and most of them were drinking heavily at the time, came home, and had some sort of altercation about drinking or money or something. HIV/AIDS sometime play a part as well; this country was one of 15 in the world highlighted by the recent PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) grant money.
So. Some of the things I’m doing, developing, or thinking about:
I see the 7th, 8th, and 9th-graders once each week for a Guidance and Counseling class. This was a weird idea for me to get used to, but it’s working out great. I’ve developed a curriculum focusing on suicide prevention; it targets increasing a future- and goal- oriented mindset, increasing coping mechanisms (particularly relational support, talking about things, which doesn’t seem to happen here at all), working with alcohol, HIV/pregnancy issues & protection, life skills, & career counseling. I’ve been asked by my government program to do a presentation on the curriculum for the rest of the volunteers in the country when we go all go into the capital in December for training, which is pretty neat. We’ll see how that goes.
A guy from North America who was born here but spent most of his life up north is trying to do stuff right now as well; a professor he knows is coming down at some point to run a national seminar on suicide, he’s helping get some sports equipment into the area, and we’re talking about trying to set up a suicide hotline.
Trying to get as much sports equipment as possible, and I want to do the footwork to get some adult sports leagues started. I was in a softball league back home, and the organizer tore his hair out; but the rest of us, about 250 people, had a great time with no work involved on our part. Softball won’t work down here, but other things will, hopefully.
I’ve contacted the main in-country producer of the chemicals, and they have agreed to give pamphlets out to all of their distributors and retailers at point-of-sale with any chemical purchase; I need to get grant money to fund it, but what I want is a simple two-sider: One side deals with intentional suicide, maybe lets people know about the hotline if we can get that going, and the other side warning about accidental suicide. One local farmer died tragically because his water and chemicals were next to one another on his tractor. Grabbed the wrong one for a drink. Some of these chemicals shut down your internal organs, you die within minutes.
What would be wonderful, WONDERFUL, would be to find a professor in the States or Canada who does counseling and research on suicide. During my Master’s, I did research with a professor focused on Peace Studies; she helped expand a Teacher’s College in an African country to include counselors as well; the counselors’ training was focused on PTSD due to that country’s ongoing external and civil wars (20 years of these now, in which a lot of child soldiers are involved). To help catalyze something like that, get long-term specialized knowledge and funding available, here, for this problem, would be amazing.
So that’s where I am right now. One thing going, another couple in the works, a hope, and a pipe-dream. Welcome to development, huh?
We’re in the region of the country (10 regions in this country, the country itself the size of Idaho, 11th-largest state) with the highest suicide rate. We’re in the specific village collection that drives up the suicide rate of this region. There are four villages together on this road, about a twenty-minute bikeride across each, total population just under 2000. This is the breadbasket of the country, provides enough food for every man, woman, and child, with more for export besides. The main rice and sugar productions are mostly right around here, and the area also provides a crazy amount of fruits and vegetables. Seventh-graders struggle to read, but third-graders can have heated discussions about the exhaust pipes of tractors (no joke), and when harvest-time comes (there are two growing seasons per year here), students disappear from school in droves to help out. Okay, so there’s the basic setup, as much as you can describe a specific region in another country in one paragraph, anyway.
Out of fewer than 2000 people, there are 5-6 attempted suicides per month. I’ll say that one more time, and I’ll add in some math. 2000 people in families of about 4 – 5, so 450 families. 60+ suicide attempts per year. Think about those numbers over a 20-year span (and this problem has been ongoing. Not every attempt leads to a successful suicide, but enough do, and there are repeat-attempters as well.
And 450 nuclear families in an enclosed area means that not only does everyone know everyone, but that everybody is related to everybody else. I don’t think I’ve found a person yet that hasn’t a lost a cousin, and most have lost a brother or sister or child or parent, to suicide.
So, that’s the situation. The typical method is poisoning via farm chemicals and pesticides; there are stories of people leaving this area for the States, living there a half-dozen years, then killing themselves in the same way as people here, and for the same reasons. It’s a cultural response at this point, and people carry it with them their entire lives. The reasons most typically involve an argument with a girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse, or occasionally with a family-member. Also, the majority of attempts are men, and most of them were drinking heavily at the time, came home, and had some sort of altercation about drinking or money or something. HIV/AIDS sometime play a part as well; this country was one of 15 in the world highlighted by the recent PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) grant money.
So. Some of the things I’m doing, developing, or thinking about:
I see the 7th, 8th, and 9th-graders once each week for a Guidance and Counseling class. This was a weird idea for me to get used to, but it’s working out great. I’ve developed a curriculum focusing on suicide prevention; it targets increasing a future- and goal- oriented mindset, increasing coping mechanisms (particularly relational support, talking about things, which doesn’t seem to happen here at all), working with alcohol, HIV/pregnancy issues & protection, life skills, & career counseling. I’ve been asked by my government program to do a presentation on the curriculum for the rest of the volunteers in the country when we go all go into the capital in December for training, which is pretty neat. We’ll see how that goes.
A guy from North America who was born here but spent most of his life up north is trying to do stuff right now as well; a professor he knows is coming down at some point to run a national seminar on suicide, he’s helping get some sports equipment into the area, and we’re talking about trying to set up a suicide hotline.
Trying to get as much sports equipment as possible, and I want to do the footwork to get some adult sports leagues started. I was in a softball league back home, and the organizer tore his hair out; but the rest of us, about 250 people, had a great time with no work involved on our part. Softball won’t work down here, but other things will, hopefully.
I’ve contacted the main in-country producer of the chemicals, and they have agreed to give pamphlets out to all of their distributors and retailers at point-of-sale with any chemical purchase; I need to get grant money to fund it, but what I want is a simple two-sider: One side deals with intentional suicide, maybe lets people know about the hotline if we can get that going, and the other side warning about accidental suicide. One local farmer died tragically because his water and chemicals were next to one another on his tractor. Grabbed the wrong one for a drink. Some of these chemicals shut down your internal organs, you die within minutes.
What would be wonderful, WONDERFUL, would be to find a professor in the States or Canada who does counseling and research on suicide. During my Master’s, I did research with a professor focused on Peace Studies; she helped expand a Teacher’s College in an African country to include counselors as well; the counselors’ training was focused on PTSD due to that country’s ongoing external and civil wars (20 years of these now, in which a lot of child soldiers are involved). To help catalyze something like that, get long-term specialized knowledge and funding available, here, for this problem, would be amazing.
So that’s where I am right now. One thing going, another couple in the works, a hope, and a pipe-dream. Welcome to development, huh?
Friday, November 2, 2007
Dog Blog
It’s a Girl!
We have a new addition to our family, a little puppy! She’s about 8 weeks old, and is a mixture of Chow Chow, Retriever, and Rotweiller (I know, we didn’t find out about the Rotweiller part until she arrived at our door!). Someone out on the main road breeds dogs, and he said he would just give her to us for free. We make sure to tell everyone here that she was a gift, because according to everyone we talk to, dogs like her cost over $100.00! (Even though she’s just a mutt). So our new puppy needed a new name. We decided that it needed to be either a name that had something to do with this country, or a name that reminded us of something we missed from home. So….we decided to call her Riesling. We miss our wine….a lot! I wanted her middle name to be Merlot, but that was maybe going a little overboard.
Since Riesling became part of our family (three weeks ago), life has not been the same. We have not had one uninterrupted night of sleep! She needs fed every three hours, she is not potty-trained (we keep lots of paper towels around for her little messes that she leaves us), and she’s teething right now. So yes, she is just like a small child!
She had some de-worming medicine right before she came to us, and we got to witness how effective that medicine was. A couple days later, I was cleaning out her little bed when I saw what I thought was a rubber band. I definitely didn’t want her choking on a rubber band, so I quickly picked it up with my fingers and threw it away. A few minutes later, I realized she had thrown up in her bed, and there were a million little “rubber bands” in the throw up! Upon closer inspection, I realized they were moving! Hmm………rubber bands don’t move. Nope, they were a bunch of little worms that had worked their way out of her system. For the next few days, we got to see worms everywhere, and I quickly took de-worming medicine for myself. I was fairly paranoid for the next week, wondering if I had worms crawling around in my stomach.
Riesling spent the first few days at school with us. The apartment had not yet been “puppy-proofed”. The students loved her! House pets are not very common here, and collars and leashes are pretty much non-existent. We get a lot of stares when we take her for walks with her little red and blue leash and red, studded collar. She’s kind of like our little celebrity dog. If only we had a little designer bag to carry her around in! Of course, she’ll soon be too big for a bag.
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