Kate Saurman

About ten years ago when I was still living in America and working in the social service system, part of my job included sitting on the restraint reduction committee. In the United States, the use of physical holds to stop a person from hurting themselves or others, are used only as a last resort and I learned a lot about minimizing their frequency. Skip ahead to now. You are reading this update because, I am a missionary, but I often feel that term is synonymous with volunteer cross-cultural social worker, learning to apply everything she once knew in a completely new context. Do you think it’s possible to help children who have endured brutal violence without that violence finding it’s way into the home, or safe house, or hospital? No. It’s not. The range of difficulties faced in the restoration process is extensive. Back in 2017, another missionary and I began planning crisis response for our homes. The best way to minimize crisis is through prevention. However, another aspect of life in the developing world is that culturally, there is little focus on pro-activity. This has a lot to do with the general desperation of day-to-day demands, a mentality that is often true, “If I don’t eat today, I won’t be alive to eat tomorrow”. There are so many things I took for granted growing up in America. I visited a psychiatric hospital here in Recife recently and was broken to find the conditions similar to that of stateside psychiatric hospitals back in the 1950s. Walking into the facility felt like stepping back in time. I will not go into details on the hospitals procedures which are brutal, but I will share one special feature. The patients live with stray cats, who freely climb in and out of the barred windows. As I’m sure you can imagine, many of the girls who come through the transition home at age 18, need to be placed there for stabilization at one point or another. Unfortunately I’m not sure if the hospital does more harm or good. I wanted to write on this topic because I wish that I been told in high school, when I was deciding how to spend my time and my life, the degree of need there was in the developing world. Our state in northeast Brazil, has a huge lack of mental healthcare, and facilities equipped to treat mental illness. My prayer in this time, after years feeling trapped by the lack of treatment options for our girls outside the safe house (and the poor conditions of those options available), is that God would raise and send professionals to the furthest edges of the earth to walk beside those who are doing their best with the tools they have. I believe Jesus works in miracles, I also believe He works in kindness and mercy, building systems that treat people well. All this to say, the past few years at Shores, we have done a lot of education around crisis reduction, standards of care, and trauma. I am often encouraged by the truth that real change, change that lasts, is slow. It looks different for each person, system or people group. It comes from the inside not the outside, and cultural transformation, is generational transformation. Over the past several years, a friend with her doctorate in Violence Against Women has been developing a training specifically for Shores. She recently spent a week with our team sharing her strategies, rooted from years of experience working in both Brazil and America. It was a great time of growth and challenge. Wrestling with these issues is what makes room for change. Again, thank you for your support and your prayers. I am beyond grateful! I hope all is well with each of you. For anyone who is interested in learning more about the state of mental health care here in Brazil, I would recommend the above film. It is about the introduction of art therapy (a personal passion of mine) to psychiatric hospital in Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s. Here in northern Brazil, the rough conditions shown continue to be our standard of care. The movie is raw and unsettling, but also a testament to progress.