Coping Strategies

Greetings from Nairobi! I want to apologize for my delay in blog posts. I have spent the better part of my last three weeks fully involved in interviews as well as trying to see as much of the country as possible. I want to reiterate my thanks to the Center of Law and Social Responsibility for giving me this amazing opportunity.

For the past three weeks, I have spent a good deal of time considering coping mechanisms. The first year of law school taught me how to manage a number of different problems: the Socratic Method, preparation for quizzes, and handling the stress of finals. However, the Center for Law and Social Responsibility guides students to use their education to help those less fortunate. In the course of that work, many students will find that our destitute clients have few happy stories, just hopes for happy endings. The question becomes how, as lawyers, we accomplish our tasks without being overcome by the stories we hear on a day-to-day basis.

While working at Mapendo, I have found this question to be a daily challenge. Since beginning my interviews I have had clients from the Congo, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Refugees in the African continent have unique stories of suffering often displaying what my father would call “man’s inhumanity to man.” I naively thought that I could handle the flood of stories coming through my office each day by separating work and home. Yet, I’ve found that listening to stories of abuse, separation, forced immigration, rape, murder, and genocide are not stories that you can detach from your own psyche and emotions.

Before I started working for Mapendo, I had a discussion with a friend in a similar kind of work. He brought up the issue of coping with refugees’ stories, and discussed his failure to manage those emotions in a suitable way. My friend told me that, to his own dismay, he separated refugees from himself. He could not listen to a refugee boy detail the rape and murder of his mother and associate that story with his own family. For him, separating himself from refugees was a survival method – a coping technique.

I left that conversation with an uneasy feeling. I felt that separating myself from my clients was exactly what I wasn’t supposed to do. At the same time I began to understand the awesome gravity that these stories held. I made a promise to attempt to not separate myself, but I was cognizant that I needed to develop a suitable coping method quickly.

In one of my recent interviews, a Somali woman, who had lost two of her children in a rocket grenade strike, succinctly explained the feeling that most refugees express in their interviews, albeit in different ways. She said that “you lose hope before you are even dead.” After hearing quotes like this, I’ll admit, my coping method is not foolproof. Yet, what I’ve found is an almost constant underlying theme of refugees’ stories is a random act of kindness. Without a doubt the original story is one of abject cruelty, but the difference between a person who is sitting in my office and a person who passed away in the country of origin is often one single act by a stranger. In this Somali woman’s case, a Somali man led her out of the warzone, where he then paid a driver to transport the woman to the Somali –Kenyan border. At the border, the local Somali community assisted the woman in crossing into Kenya.

In no way am I suggesting that these random acts of kindness absolve what has come before them, and certainly I acknowledge my inability to truly identify with a mother of two. As for now, I guess my coping method, of finding a silver lining in each story, works because I want to find a silver lining. I don’t want to lose hope in the populations I serve or the world at large. Perhaps it’s idealism to an extreme or just youthful naiveté, but for me, for now, it works.