Meeting Psychosocial Needs in Africa

May 15, 2009

John Stott Ministries-Langham Scholar Gladys Mwiti is the co-founder of Oasis Africa (OA), an organization that has equipped people to counsel and train others in more than 16 African nations. Issues addressed by OA include professional care for those with emotional struggles; supervision for psychology and counseling students; training leaders, counselors and trainers; HIV and AIDS care and prevention; children-at-risk projects; trauma counseling; and research and publishing. Gladys and her organization have helped with trauma relief after the genocide in Rwanda, after the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in 1988, and recently, after the tension and violence in Nairobi last year. John Stott Ministries’ Tiffany Randall had a recent conversation with Gladys to uncover how her passion for the children of Africa developed into OA, and her dedication to Africa’s spiritual, mental, and physical health.

What led you into the field of psychology?
It’s quite a long story. As a teacher and a Christian working in Africa, automatically you want to care for the children. Wherever I went, I began a Christian Union, where I’d lead the students to the Lord, and then disciple them to live out their faith. I did a lot of my co-curricular work with kids in all sorts of clubs and projects. I joined the Kenya Students Christian Fellowship very early. When I was 19, I started the Meru Evangelistic Team, a team of students who would do outreach in the high schools. We preached a lot in many high schools bringing kids to the Lord. Then many children would want to talk to me because of problems in their lives. Once my husband and I were preaching in a school where so many kids came and received the Lord. Then we said, “If you have problems that you’d want to share with us or pray with us about, please, stay behind.” The students formed a line, and one after the other was talking to each of us and praying with us until 3 a.m. Such programs are called l “Weekend Challenges” starting on Friday and ending on Sunday. I began counseling these kids long before I knew how to counsel.

Training programme cunducted by Oasis Africa conducted post-election violence

One event finally got me out of the classroom to seek training in professional counseling. I was doing very well as a science teacher, heading the department, and was also deputy headmistress at a girls’ day school. One morning, just before I did assembly, one girl came running into school. I had led her to the Lord the year before and knew that she had many family-related problems at home. She came to me…and said, “My dad came home drunk last night, as usual, and there was a lot of tension. Then this morning my mom said, ‘Go get your things, we are leaving.’ And I asked, ‘Where are we going?’ ‘We are going to your Grandma’s, you and your brothers and sisters, she replied.”

“What about Daddy?” the girl asked. And her mother had replied, “Well, your father can stay if he wants to.” And the girl asked her mom, “Are you going to leave Daddy alone?” The long and short of it is, the mother looks at the child and says, “If you think you love me, you come with me. If you love your daddy, you stay with him.” The girl replied, “It isn’t that I don’t love you, but someone should stay with Daddy.” So the girl picked up her bag and ran over to school and looked at me and said, “Did I make the right decision?”

The Psycho-Social programme concentrated on trauma healing, teambuilding and reconciliation so as to increase productivity in various organisations among employees which were severely affected by the violence.

Nobody ever told me what to do with broken families. This was one of the many stories I’d bring home every day to my husband. Finally, he told me, “Why don’t you go back to school and get some skills if you want to help those children!” So that’s how I left teaching and went back to University. When I sought financial support to attend a private college, the only place offering psychology in Kenya, the ministry of education told me, “We do not need psychologists,” so they wouldn’t give me a salary or scholarship. For this reason, my bachelor’s degree was a big struggle, trying to feed the children and afford school fees at the same time. But by God’s grace, and my husband’s unrelenting support, I’m here. I graduated summa cum laude for my B.A. in Psychology, and went on to graduate with honors for the M.A. in Counseling Psychology.

What did you do once you received your Masters degree?
In 1989, I wondered what to do with my secular psychology degree…how would I integrate my faith with practice? I was then reading a devotional called, Every Day with Jesus by Selwyn Hughes in England, a renowned counselor who had trained with Larry Crabb in the USA. He accepted me and for four weeks I sat at his feet learning how to integrate psychology and Christianity. I went back home and founded Oasis Africa. I was the first integration therapist in the area, leading the organization for eight years, involved in the Rwanda genocide, HIV and AIDS, school and church-based counseling programs, among many other things. We trained hundreds of pastors and lay counselors for the church, schools and community. The need was huge.

How did your experience with trauma recovery in Rwanda help equip you for the post-election violence in January in Nairobi?
Actually, the Rwanda genocide equipped me long before the post-election violence. It is because of our experience in Rwanda that we were able, as Oasis Africa, to respond to the Nairobi U.S. Embassy bombing of 1988. When the bomb blew in Nairobi, my family was just getting ready to come to Fuller. I did not feel that I had the strength to get involved. I was very tired from packing, handing over to the staff at Oasis Africa, and so on. Then came the bombing. The staff we had went to the hospital to visit the injured people but we hadn’t done anything with what you call the “walking wounded,” those who had experienced the bombing but were not seriously injured, then the bereaved, the many who had lost businesses, rescue workers, the press, and so on. But I wasn’t going there; I didn’t have the energy. I kept quiet.

Kibera School kids receiving a pair of shoes and socks from Feed the Children.

Then my husband tells me, “Gladys, I know you are busy, I know you are tired, BUT, how can you explain it that when Rwanda blew up you were the first professional team to go there. Now, this has happened at your doorstep and you do nothing!” I went to my staff in my office and I asked them to pray. We have a very prayerful staff, and after a day or two, one of them said “Oh! We can use the same approach here that we used in Rwanda!” We went to the newspapers, television, radio, and we sent an ad that said, “If you have ever trained at OA, we need you for the bombing.” Through our Pan Africa Lay Counselors Training program, we knew that we had individuals working in churches, schools, NGOs, and the community; people who had received at least 150 hours of lay counseling training. With additional training in crisis response, these would help us run community groups for trauma healing post bombing.

The following week, we launched Beyond the Disaster Trauma Counseling Program, and the press came together with key leaders. Oasis Africa staff was there with registration tables and folders. We called the printing press and they had delivered 600 copies of the book I had written about the Rwanda event. By 9 a.m. there were 300 people sitting in the All Saints Cathedral Church in Nairobi. God heard our prayers. The counselors had come by bus; others walked long distances, while some rode of the night train from outer cities. They were ready to work, and that’s what saved Nairobi. Last year, we remembered that we had all these skills to respond to the post-election violence. We were ready to go, this time with professional M.A. Counseling Psychologists under my supervision.

Gershon Mwiti with the Kibera School kids during the prayer day for the kids on the eve of their final national exam.

We did both assessment and intervention. Now I have sets of data that I’m using with Fuller Seminary’s School of Psychology students for their writing projects and our professional writing at Oasis Africa as well. “What does traumatic stress look like?” The way you respond to a traumatic event now depends very much on your past experience and on your coping abilities and resilience. In our current study, we are looking at all these factors beginning from the Nairobi USA Embassy bombing. There are individuals who after last year’s post election violence find it very difficult to cope because they were also in the 1998 bombing. Others have lost children to AIDS, while others have been attacked by robbers in the streets. So we looked at all that traumatic stress in the post-election study and we have a lot of data. Findings will help us to understand how post-traumatic stress impacts people in this population.

What excites you most about the future of Oasis Africa and what are some growth areas that you’re seeing?

One of the growth areas is that we are seeing ourselves reaching out more and more to the rest of Africa. I have now three books in the field that are doing very well. Through using these books and other materials for training of trainers and counselors, we are seeing what we call the “Oasis Africa Ripple Effect” as trained people train others. Our core call is to equip the church to be a caring community, and this is happening. I just came from Mexico for the Lausanne Congress on Care and Counsel as Mission Consultation. The model this group wishes to adopt for the worldwide church is exactly the model you’re seeing in OA: empowering the church to use care and counsel as a tool of evangelism and missions. In this regard, I see the future of OA as planting seeds that will begin to germinate all over the continent, especially through Bible schools, seminaries, churches, schools, corporate, non-governmental organizations, and the general community.

One of my books, Christian Counseling: An African Indigenous Perspective (Fuller Press, 2006) co-authored with Professor Al Dueck of the School of Psychology, is doing very well in Africa. The challenge however, is to train pastors and Bible school instructors on how to use it as a training tool. What works best is to sit with a team of 20 to 30 pastors and go through the book with them for three or four weeks, after which they prepare action plans to go and train others. This way, the book comes alive. Besides the 2,000 copies that Fuller Seminary Press printed, we have requested permission to re-print it here in Africa through a local publishing company so that it can be easily available.

My other hope is seeing one seminary out there in Africa begin a school of psychology. Right now we are asking which one and finding out actually [how to] model Fuller School of Psychology, fully fledged, producing doctorates, down the line. My hope is that many people, both funding agencies and Christian psychologists, can come and partner with us and help produce local doctorates. Already the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology is producing Ph.D.s in Theology. So we need to have another school giving us doctorates in psychology in the near future.

Then a big hope is to have an Oasis Africa Center, to house our training and counseling programs. Here, we can model how Africa should engage with indigenous cultures so as to develop a holistic relevant system of psychology. We need psychologies that are biblically centered, homegrown and professionally sound so that we can create sustainable programs in the continent.

Then a big hope is to have an Oasis Africa Center, to have a place of our own which becomes the counseling center, the training center and begins to model how Africa should engage with indigenous cultures. And actually coming up with psychologies that are biblically centered, homegrown and professionally sound, to reach the rest of Africa.

Can you comment about the difference between meeting people’s immediate physical needs and their psychological needs and why the psychological aspect is important?

First and foremost you need to know that I am so grateful to John Stott Ministries and CISF for supporting me through school, more so because I think I’m the only Ph.D. in Psychology to have graduated from these two programs.

There is such a huge need for psychological mental health interventions. I believe that poverty is very much a psychology problem, although no one has found a direct cause and effect relationship. Poor families, especially those living in poor unsafe neighborhoods, have a lot of psychological struggles going on. This is because often, many children grow up in an atmosphere that is not safe, living in a violence-ridden community. And then if that violence is in the family, they are also affected. So safety in the family is critical, even though people have to live in poverty. The family is the foundation for a child’s mindset. If a child begins to believe they can succeed in life irrespective of poverty, they can make it because they begin to see hope. For example, if you look at Barack Obama, he did not grow up in a “normal” family with a mother and a father. He was a kid brought up by his grandmother. If that grandmother had unsafe habits like drug use and abuse, or domestic violence, this man would not be talking about hope right now. I trust that Obama’s “Yes we can,” is not coming from now. It must be a theme that he has used on himself: “Yes, I can” possibly arising from someone who told him: “Yes, you can!” At OA, our hope is that children in our slums can also say: “In spite of whatever is around me, in spite of what life has handed me, in spite of my father being an alcoholic, in spite of whatever, “YES I CAN.” In our Mashaka Children’s Centre, we are training these orphans and vulnerable children to believe that irrespective of their circumstances, they can grow up one day to be successful boys and girls, man and women. We also train parents to provide a safe place for the children because the environment itself will encourage the child to perform better.

Research indicates that if a child is living with a depressed mother, the child gets depressed. This means that the mental health of the child is dependent upon the mental health of the mother. It follows that if we can deal with factors that are linked to parental depression, the family can begin to plan together with the energy that was going into destroying one another becoming a creative force for the betterment of the members. The children learn to pick up whatever resources they have and do better than a child who has everything, but they don’t have mental health. Mental poverty can be dealt with whether in the slums or in the best suburb. This is because mental health is not dependent on material things but on the hope that the parents and the environment brings to the child. So the slum child, to me, actually needs more psychotherapy than a kid who has everything. And, this is what we at OA are about – providing psychological mental health services to the educated in high rise buildings and giving exactly the same quality assistance to the poorest of the poor in our slums.

I am convinced that sustainable poverty eradication programs would never be done without psychology and without counseling services. . When people are not behaviorally and cognitively empowered, development money can easily be likened to pouring aid money into a hole, a bottomless pit. Many communities have gone into a dependency mode, feeling that the humanitarian NGO is a “rescuer.” We need to turn it over and say: “You rescue yourself. I’m simply here to catalyze that skill, to throw you a rope and pull you out. But then when I pull you out and you get running on your own, then you can change your own life.” Sustainable development should include psychologists, counselors, coaches, and mentors who can empower the service recipients, open their eyes to see possibilities. This was, we break through the learned helplessness that characterizes many poor communities.

Gladys received her Ph.D. with support from the JSM-Langham Scholars program. For more information on how to support other Majority World scholars, visit:https://app.etapestry.com/hosted/JohnStottMinistries/OnlineGivingUnitedKingdom.html