Stress, Trauma by Church Personnel in Africa Occasion First Ever Continental Conference

“Generally, we found that psychological training and therapy is very helpful for Church personnel for personal development and in their function to help others, which they can do better when they are healthy themselves,” Karola Block, an independent consultant on organizational development contracted to carry out the evaluation of four Missio-funded counselling training institutes in Nairobi told ACI Africa.

Participants in the two-day Nairobi conference come from regional episcopal conferences in English speaking Africa including the Association of Member Episcopal Conferences in Eastern Africa (AMECEA), Inter-regional Meeting of Bishops of Southern Africa (IMBISA), Regional Association of Religious women, Caritas, Conference of Major Superiors, and institutions on Mental health in Africa, among others.

“Being part of this conference is a conversion for me personally in the sense that in the tasks that we do, we hardly think about mental health as being pertinent to the holistic growth of the human person,” the Secretary General of the Inter-territorial Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Gambia and Sierra Leone (ITCABIC), Fr. Paul Morana Sandi told ACI Africa Tuesday, October 22.

AMECEA Chairman, Bishop Charles Kasonde has termed the conference “very pertinent and very important to the life of the Church.”

Bishop Kasonde thanked Missio for spearheading the initiative saying, “My appreciation is to Missio Aachen who have come up with this brilliant idea of recognizing the need for psychological and spiritual counselling and see a way of attending to our brothers and sisters who are traumatized in life sometimes through the trauma induced by political hegemony and differences.”

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The head of the Pastoral department at IMBISA, Fr. Benedict Vilakati Dumisani described the Nairobi conference significant as “it cuts right into the center of what IMBISA is all about caring for human beings whether for people inside the Church or outside the Church.”

Fr. Dumisani added, “This conference in the context of the Church becomes very important because that is specifically what seems to be lacking in our systems especially once people leave the seminaries, they are basically left out on their own and have to swim or drown.”

“Psychosocial counselling is important to the Archdiocese of Kasama and its people because indeed all of us at one stage or another need some degree of counselling because some things do not go together,” Archbishop Ignatius Chama told ACI Africa.

The Local Ordinary of Zambia’s Kasama Archdiocese added, “Remember we are talking of us being integral or holistic, at times, these things do not match, and you discover that you need somebody to accompany you as a counsellor.”

On his part, the Secretary General of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), Fr. Trwase Henry Akaabiam considers the training “needful at the moment” and one that the facilitators should consider “extending to other parts of the continent.”

Going forward, Missio Aachen hopes to “achieve further sensitization for the subject and hope those who attended the conference develop their own solutions for their own countries and institutions they are coming from,” German-based Dr. Vogt said.

“We hope to bring the torch to other African countries mainly French speaking countries which are not represented here yet who would be interested in the subject and develop for their part of Africa,” Dr. Vogt concluded in the interview with ACI Africa at the venue of the conference.