The Newsletter becomes a travelogue this month as faculty and learners took to the road and the skies in March and April. Sue Levin flew to Washington, D.C. in April where she joined other presidents of state AMFT organizations from across the country. They met in a team building effort that included lobbying legislators to reinstate MFTs, briefly on the list of covered Medicare providers of mental health services when health care legislation came up for a vote last year, and dropped when Congress trimmed the Bill at the last moment.
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        Mid-month, Sue and Saliha Bava spent two days in conversation and consultation with Navajo Nation participants in Four Corners, NM, at the invitation of Charles Stacey, Counseling Supervisor and a graduate of U.H. Clear Lake MFT program   (see photos). The workshop, titled: Playing with Postmodernism: Practice, Process, Performance and Psychotherapy, brought together present generation counselors and traditional medicine men in a teambuilding experience, that, according to Stacey, has made a "tremendous difference to the Navajo Nation." Conversations among staff counselors following the workshop indicate they were excited by the presentation and are relating differently to their clients as a result of what they learned. Sue and Saliha interviewed a senior traditional medicine man and a young westernized counselor who were able to speak about their differing concerns and expectations of the healing practice while others listened and then reflected from an "as if" position. A documentary film about Monte Roberts, the real "horse whisperer", added to the mix and, according to Navajo tradition, "dialogue will continue."

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               With barely enough time to repack her suitcase, Saliha has flown off to Delhi to spend three weeks with her family in India, her first trip home in two years.

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                   Laura McPherson, OLLU alum and currently an HGI supervised clinical associate, spent a long weekend outside Phoenix, AZ, attending the wedding of her niece.
                                        
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                Margarita Saez, was winding up a three month Visiting Scholar Program at the Institute as April wound down. Margarita has participated in virtually every learning experience offered by faculty and other learners. Her program has also included a family medicine internship at Houston clinics staffed by UT Health Science Center medical students and family practitioners under the supervision of Thelma Jean Goodrich and Jose Bayona. Margarita, herself a retired physician, plans to establish a family therapy practice with a postmodern flavor when she returns to her home in Monterrey, Mexico, after a stopover in San Antonio where she keeps an apartment. Margarita's engaging personality, wit and wisdom have captured the hearts of those of us who have had a chance to sit with her in classes, meetings and social gatherings during the past three months. HGI friends honored her and said farewell at a dinner at the end of April. She will be missed.

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        Glen Boyd is sharing pictures (see link) and memories from the March car trip he and Chrys made in Scotland. Glen's invitation to speak to a group of therapists and counselors at Couple Counseling Scotland came from his longtime "pen pal", Ronald Beasley, of Edinburgh.   Beasley, a former minister, educator and counselor, trains volunteers who work with the organization. Glen titled his presentation: "Clients as Experts and Heroes: Clinical Implications of Postmodern and Social Construction Approaches." He said "they loved it and wanted to hear more." Glen and Chrys plan to return in March, 2005, and spend a whole week in Edinburgh.

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Christine Niles and her family made a first time trip to Big Bend in West Texas over HISD spring break. She was ecstatic over the beauty of the park and wondered why they had not visited it before. Christine has been instrumental in getting a Book Club started for colleagues at HGI. The avid readers have been focusing on memoirs, including most recently, The Color of Water, by James McBride. Their story, told in his and her voices in alternating chapters, is a moving tribute to McBride's white, Jewish mother who raised her 12 biracial children virtually alone following the death of two African-American husbands, and sent each child off to college. With doctors, lawyers, educators, artists, writers and musicians among her brood, "Ruth" went college and achieved a degree of her own in Social Work at the age of 67. The Book Club members highly recommend this touching, funny tribute to an amazing woman.

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Our always peripatetic founder, Harlene Anderson, has continued to share and practice her postmodern collaborative approach to teaching, training and consulting around the world in the past two years. Pins in her personal world map highlight presentations in Finland, Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, Germany, Mexico, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. A trip to Turkey in March provided an opportunity to present at the International Family Therapy Association Family Therapy Congress in Istanbul. In keeping with the conference theme, "Families in a Time of Global Crisis," and Harlene's preferred stance of not being the expert, she shared with the conferees an earlier experience of creating a collaborative learning community among NGO staff workers at a women's center in Tuzla, Bosnia. The staff had brought her and her colleague, Pat Blakeney, psychologist and consultant at the Shriners Burn Institute in Galveston, Texas, their feelings of "hopelessness and helplessness" in the face of extreme violence that the women and children of Bosnia had suffered. Harlene reported that through a step-by-step conversational process, creative juices began to thaw and flow, and the staff was able to create a "truly amazing, truly community based-pilot project" to address the issues of violence that had previously overwhelmed them and left them despairing of ever bringing hope or help to the Bosnian women and children in the center.

Harlene is writing an article that will detail the step-by-step collaborative process that she believes is more in tune with the needs of today's global challenges than traditional Western models of "expert" intervention and training. In her article, she will "showcase the Bosnia staff's creativity and expertise" as they designed the project and tailored it to the needs of their culture and community. She believes that their sense of ownership bodes well for the sustainable success of the project.

Harlene adds a reader's note to her Istanbul trip: "Using Social Constructionist Thinking in Training Social Workers Living and Working under Threat of Political Violence," appears in Social Work, Vol. 48, 4, October 2003. Harlene met the author, Michal Shamai, a social worker from Israel, at the conference and read the article on the flight back to Houston. She recommends it as "a nice exposition and example of a collaborative learning community."

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                                                                                  Carolyn Callahan

Supporting Documents:
Glen Edinburgh.pdf
Pdrm0931.jpg
Pdrm0935.jpg
Navajo Nation pics.pdf