It's All Coming Back To Me Now

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How's Our Young Doing Now?
I really can't believe the things I am hearing from the young ones nowadays. I was on my way to camp on the bus when I heard this boy, no older than eleven years old, with his two friends and he kept exclaiming "Motherf**cker" repeatedly. Where did he learnt it? I really hope this is not representative of the state that our young is in now... I really can't imagine how much worse it can be a few years later.

Direct or Indirect?
Anyway, I really enjoyed today's training at my in-camp. It was mainly covering topics to do with counselling skills, post-traumatic stress disorder, critical incidence stress management etc. As the speakers spoke, the things that I have learnt in my social work education were all slowly coming back to me and so did my passion to help people in emotional pain. It has been some time since I last felt this passion, ever since I gave up direct social work. Well, once in a while I will still ponder whether I will one day return to direct social work or will I stay with volunteer management?

The speakers shared with us how they were deployed to work in incidents such as the F5 crash in Taiwan, Asian Tsunami Crisis Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Relief (HADR), RSN Courageous collision etc and the thought of working alongside with the psychologists during such events both thrills me as well as worries me. It indeed is an opportunity for me to practice the skills I have learnt in social work (which I have had little chance to hone in the past few years), but of course I question my readiness to be deployed in such incidents, since these are human lives we are talking about.

When Crisis Strikes...
I then began to roughly understand the complexities of working at such critical incidents when we tried our hand with a case study involving a fictitious accident and explosion in a camp. There was indeed a lot of information to process and very soon, we found that many teams, including mine, were entrenched with the maths; trying to work out how many were killed in action, how many were wounded in action etc. Then, soon after, we were reminded that our focus should be on identifying people who might need intervention rather than on the maths. Duh! Could have seen that coming. But even as my team worked together, I can see team members having difference of opinion and mind you, this is just a simulation, I can't imagine in a real crisis, emotions will be running high and there might be greater tension in trying to manage within the crisis.

Carnage
As part of the training, we were also showed a video on some carnage after terrorist bombing of a bus in Jerusalem. It wasn't a pretty sight as we saw pieces of human meat and skin lying about. There was even a picture of a parts of a leg left hanging over the chair... it was rather traumatising. Of course, we were warned about it before the video and have been told to speak to the psychologist should we be experiencing secondary traumatisation after watching the video. Frankly, yes the video was disturbing but I guess it wasn't as disturbing as the photos of suicide victims I saw during my social work attachment to SOS, as we were compiling statistics at the coroner's court, looking through files of deaths. Then, curiosity got the better of me and my friend and we went to see the photos la. Smart alecks, hahaha, both me and my friend ended up having no appetite for two days.