Well, as it’s been all consuming for the last month I don’t
think it would be very fair for me not to tell you about the Dialectical
Behavior Training (DBT) training. The training was pretty straightforward, just me and a co facilitator,
Metti, and 11 student clinicians. Metti was a great counterpart. She’d always
interject when the class didn’t understand what I was saying which was great
because I usually needed a break or I had no idea that they weren’t
understanding me. The students were wonderful as well very interested and
engaged, they were all trained nurses or physician’s assistants that had
received six months of mental health counseling training from The Carter
Center.
The training was at a place called La Lagune. I’ve been told
that a Chinese person built it. It’s a nice place, it has a deck that they’ve
built out over the water that functions as a restaurant area. They also have a
pair of conference rooms, one of which we used for training. Of course only one
of the two rooms had air conditioning and unfortunately that was not ours. In
fact, the two conference rooms shared a wall that had windows that I faced
while I was teaching. So the whole time that I was lecturing I could see the
other group in their conference room and it looked great. But, c’est la vie, as
they say.
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| Trainees hard at work |
The training itself went well. I was pleasantly surprised
the first morning that I arrived and was told there was breakfast prepared for
the training. And, while we were scheduled to start at eight, breakfast wasn’t
served until eight thirty and of course we couldn’t start until everyone had
breakfast. So that pushed us back to about a nine thirty start time then we
needed an hour and a half for lunch and we had to be done by four so everyone
could avoid traffic. So I didn’t have quite as much time as I would have liked
but it all worked out in the end.
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| Our training area |
“Don’t act like bell-ay” I wrote that last word phonetically
but I believe it’s actually spelled “pbella”. Apparently a pbelle is an
ignorant person and the phrase “don’t act like pbelle” means don’t act
ignorant. For example if you were in a sketchy area someone might advise you,
“don’t act like pbelle”. Although, when I arrived home and tried to act cool
and throw out some phrases to the housekeeper and security I learned that
Kpelle, which sounds very similar, is actually one of the sixteen tribes of
Liberia and it’s a racist phrase to say “don’t act like Kpelle”. The housekeeper,
Vicki, told me she is Kpelle and that the stereotype of Kpelle people is that
they are ignorant. So now I don’t know what to think. I probably won’t use that
phrase in mixed company.
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| View from the window |
Speaking of the sixteen tribes I learned something else
pretty amazing. Apparently most people in Liberia are at least bilingual.
Something none of the books mentioned was that every tribe has its own language
that survives today. And, most people know at least one tribal language in
addition to English. Vicki apparently knows Kpelle and another tribal language.
Jack, the security guard, knows English, French and Crown which is a tribe from
Sierra Leone. That little bit of trivia has totally amazed me. I barely speak
English and here I am surrounded by bi and tri lingual people.
Another interesting fact that Vicki told me is that during
the Civil Wars in Liberia there were some racial divisions and genocides
committed because of those divisions. So, in order to avoid the violence, Vicki
learned to speak a second tribal language so she could pass as a member of that
tribe if questioned about it.
Well that’s about it for this week. Feel free to reach out
to me on email at timdaniel25@gmail.com,
it’s nice to hear from people I don’t get the chance to talk to often.
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