OperationSAFE

19/12/2024

03/12/2024

31/10/2024

On War and Children

Let me share some data that came out today,

1. Last year 2023, saw the highest number of conflicts involving countries (59) since 1946. So far this year looks just as bad.

2. The last three years have been the most violent since the end of the Cold War, with the number of children affected almost doubling since the mid-90's.

3. 18.9% of the global child population (473 million) lives within 50km of where battle deaths are taking place compared to around 10% in the mid-90's.

How does living in a conflict zone affect children? Because children's brains are still developing, living in fear and uncertainty can hardwire certain responses for survival. The parts of the brain that are used get stronger, giving them an advantage in that violent context. But these advantages turn into disadvantages when society becomes peaceful again.

The result in some areas is constant conflict where each new generation of children is primed to react violently, ready to continue the fight, as that is what they are most used to.

The bad news is that children are the most vulnerable and bear the longest lasting effects of war and it is getting worse.

The good news is that children can recover! Children are like plastic in that just as they are shaped by violence they can also be shaped by hope, love, and connection.

• Pray for churches we are training in conflict areas to help these children.
• Pray that we can reach into more of these conflict areas.
• Pray that the cycle of violence can be stopped in this generation.

30/10/2024

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18/10/2024

Pray for our ongoing OpSAFE child trauma camp in Kharkiv, Ukraine being run by a local church to help children while the area is being bombed daily by Russians.

16/10/2024

So while I am waiting for my dissertation revisions, I guest lectured for a class at the Asian Pacific Nazarene Theological Seminary this morning and then Pete and I held a strategic planning meeting for the OpSAFE child trauma program. We came up with 5 goals for the next few years.

Goal 1 - to establish 4 full-time staff positions funded by regular OpSAFE donations by Dec 31st, 2025,

Goal 2 - to develop a robust online presence for OpSAFE by Dec 31st, 2026 for fundraising, training, volunteer management, reporting, and triage,

Goal 3 - to design a partnership development process to identify new national partners during crises and build up existing partners by Dec 31st, 2024,

Goal 4 - to introduce OpSAFE programs to new partners and develop and introduce new OpSAFE programs to new and existing partners in 2025,

Goal 5 - to establish ongoing research partnerships using OpSAFE data in 2025.

To come up with these goals we analyzed OpSAFE's system of equipping local churches to provided mental health psychosocial support to children after mass trauma events. We performed a SWOT analysis of internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats. And finally came up with some SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely) that will help us achieve our vision to make mental health psychosocial support available to every child who needs it after a crisis.

Pray with us that these goals can be reached, and Pete can help many more children in need around the world.

05/10/2024

What makes a disaster bad?

All the way from the societal level down to the individual child there are four factors that contribute to making a disaster either something that is overcome and makes us stronger or is devastating with long-term repercussions.

1. Exposure - A lot depends on the disaster, some like tornadoes touch down and destroy one house and leave the neighbors unscathed. Others like hurricanes affect vast areas, but still some neighborhoods will be hit harder.

2. Susceptibility - some people don't have many options and so live in cheaper areas that are more prone to flooding or fire danger.

3. Coping - These are the resources already put into place to help mitigate some of the risk.

4. Adaptation - These are the resources that can be mobilized to help areas that are overwhelmed.

So looking at Hurricane Helene, the size and ferocity of the storm meant that EXPOSURE for those in its direct path was great. But that is only part of the story.

For those in western North Carolina in small Appalachian mountain communities they were very SUSCEPTIBLE because the towns were built along rivers in narrow steep valleys, usually with one road along that river going in and out. So the flooding hit them much harder than flatland further down.

But where the biggest hit happened was that they were simply unprepared for something like this to happen. Normal hurricane predictions would assume that coastal cities would be hit hardest, with more inland cities getting less impact, while mountain communities would escape most storm damage. So these towns had little to no COPING strategies in place to deal with something like this. From state to local to neighborhoods to individuals they weren't thinking that they would need to do much.

Finally, ADAPTATION is the resources pulled in from the outside to help overwhelmed communities. These resources have to come from somewhere and so are prepositioned near where they will be needed. So you guessed it, they are aimed at helping coastal communities.

All of these factors means that for the Appalachian towns in western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee this storm has been brutal and the response so far has been very chaotic. Thankfully, the U.S.A has many resources both formal and informal to bring to help these communities. But they will need help for a considerable amount of time.

Pray for local churches in the area to be strengthened, restored, and empowered so that they can be an ongoing comfort and support for their communities.

04/10/2024

How to Pray When Disaster Strikes

There is an old adage that goes like this, “Well, I guess all that we can do is pray…” I approach prayer quite a bit differently and perhaps so should you. Prayer always comes first – before we can even attempt to do our “little bit” we should make sure that we have called in the “big guns”. I originally wrote this prayer list for the earthquake in Haiti. If it is helpful in organizing your thoughts feel free to join in and pray with me.

1. Pray for those in need of rescue that it will come swiftly.

There are many who are in need of miracles. That teams would arrive an hour sooner, that dogs would catch a faint scent amidst the stench of death, that the right piece of concrete would be moved. For all the training and effort that the courageous rescue teams put in, at this point they need miracles more than anything else.

2. Pray for the rescuers – safety, rest, encouragement, in the midst of horror and unrelenting pain.

The job that the rescue teams face is completely overwhelming and they will fail many more times than they will succeed. Rescue teams suffer great personal trauma and often become suicidal months after an event. Pray for these courageous men and women now and after they return.

3. Pray for families that have witnessed the unthinkable, are worried about loved ones, and fearful for their own safety.

For every person who is missing, dead or severely injured in the disaster there are ten more who care about them and find themselves unable to do anything about it. Pray that emotional needs would receive attention amidst all of the physical needs.

4. Pray for children who need comfort and safety, hugs and reassurance – even if they are physically “fine.”

Children are the most vulnerable amidst the aftermath of a disaster. Every child whose world has been disrupted, seen the death of another person or lost friends or family is in need of emotional care, even if they have not suffered physical harm themselves.

5. Pray for governments and authorities that all red tape would dissappear and corruption would cease.

International relief efforts are often hampered by red tape and governments can find getting relief to local areas difficult because of corruption. Pray for aid to go unhindered to the people that need it most.

6. Pray for relief agencies to have wisdom and compassion to make a lasting difference.

A disaster is a great opportunity to make forward progress. But long lasting change will come through courageous and wise decisions that deal with the source of problems.

7. Pray for those around you that they would respond not just with what they can do, but with their heart.

The temptation that we all have is to give a small donation and call it the best that we can do. We all have many reasons why we cannot give more. Pray that hearts would be moved and that people would be truly generous.

8. Pray for yourself that you would have a heart of compassion – start now and it will grow.

A true heart of compassion is not just ready to give when the need arises. A true heart of compassion seeks out ways to help even when no one else notices that there is suffering. A true heart of compassion will allow itself to continue caring long after the world has lost interest.

28/09/2024

Updated and double-checked the list of figures (18 charts), list of tables (25 tables), footnotes (242 footnotes), bibliography (200 entries). With the bibliography this behemoth stands at 263 pages but afterwards I will need to include in the appendix full charts for all 50+ child trauma interventions we have data for in the Philippines over the last 10 years.

For those still interested after all that nerdiness my dissertation title is

SETTING THE CHILD IN THE MIDST: A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO SCREENING POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS SYMPTOMS IN CHILDREN AFTER DISASTERS IN THE PHILIPPINES

BY

JONATHAN E. WILSON

A Dissertation

Submitted to

Asia-Pacific Nazarene Theological Seminary
In partnership with Asia Graduate School of Theology
Philippines

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in Holistic Child Development

23/09/2024

My PhD is in Holistic Child Development. So what does 'Holistic' mean?

Typically when organizations try to help children at risk they think in terms of programs. "What can we do that will make a difference?" The best ones attempt to create a lasting change in a child's life. The worst just give them something and then disappear.

The OpSAFE program equips local churches to better understand trauma, help kids feel safe, and connects them with support in their community. What truly makes it holistic is that while it is focused on mental health, it is always partnered with the local church.

A local church is much much more than just a program. It is a community and a relationship. The local church can do much more to help children with trauma than any program ever can.

I always look at trauma from four angles; exposure, susceptibility, coping and adaptation. There is a role for the local church in each of these four.

1. Reduce Exposure - mass trauma events like disasters or war are just the most obvious form of trauma. But in every community there are children exposed to trauma that is hidden. The first responsibility of the church is to ensure that children are always safe at church. Then churches need to be prepared to bring help for children when hidden trauma is revealed. Churches also need to coach families in how to guide their children appropriately to reduce chronic abuse and neglect.

2. Reduce Susceptibility - churches can advocate for the children of the poor or marginalized who are more vulnerable. Likewise churches can raise awareness of the needs of children with special needs and offer practical support to families.

3. Promote Coping - the family is the first line of defense for children coping with trauma. The church has a holistic role in supporting strong families, marriages, and parenting. Its most important role is modeling at the local level what loving relationships look like in the context people in that area live in with the challenges that they face.

4. Promoting Adaptation - in crises, the local church can respond with an OperationSAFE camp to restore a sense of safety to children. They can rebuild community and connection. They can help that community and the children to make sense out of what can be overwhelming. The church encourages growth in faith, trust in God and reestablishing comforting routines through meeting together for worship.

My short term goal with OperationSAFE camps is to provide immediate relief for children who experienced trauma from disaster or war. But more holistically, we want them to be part of a safe community that understands trauma, protects them from it, supports them in it, and helps them to grow strong and resilient.

16/09/2024

I made progress today! The goal of my dissertation is to find a way to rapidly assess which children need help the most after disaster.

There are quite a lot of people studying this, as millions of children are affected every year. But most of these studies on resilience and risk happen over long periods of time - like from 6 months to 10 years! I am trying to develop a rapid assessment to triage care to the kids who need it most.

So the experts in this field have looked at 67 of these studies and their results were that across all these studies the resilient trajectory occurs 65.7% of the time. My results today looking across 52 of our child trauma camps was that the resilient trajectory occurred 65.06% of the time. That is close!

There is still a lot of adjustments to make (about 100 pages or so) but I am pretty happy that our 5 day assessment is starting to match up with assessments taking months or years.

Pray that we can understand better how children respond to trauma and can direct limited resources to those who need it the most.

10/09/2024

A third finding of my research is that when it comes to trauma the local community is the most important factor. Out of 52 camps held in four regions of the Philippines in response to typhoons, floods, and earthquakes I looked for patterns in the data. Were certain types of disasters more difficult or certain regions more vulnerable?

Overall, there was no significant difference in the severity of initial trauma symptoms between types of disaster, and only a small difference between regions. But when local camps of one type of disaster or region are compared there is a broad range of severity. It is the local community that determines risk/resilience. How so?

Risk can be expressed as exposure multiplied by vulnerability. This applies on the individual child level but also on the community/society level. During the same typhoon, one community can be hit harder and suffer more damage than another (exposure) but there are other factors that can either make it worse or better. If that community is impoverished or in an area subject to violence, they can be more vulnerable to the effects and have a harder time recovering.

In the same way communities that are prepared, work together, and share strong connections are more resilient even when hit by a more destructive disaster. At the core of the OperationSAFE intervention is training local communities to care for the mental health of children when crisis strikes. Churches become a resource for their communities when they need it most and unlike most disaster relief that comes from the outside, they will continue to be an ongoing support.

06/09/2024

The second interesting finding from my research is that school age girls are slightly more resilient to trauma than boys. But it gets much more interesting when we look closer. It turns out that 6-7 year old girls and boys have the same resilience, but the 8 year old girls jump ahead a year and have the same resilience as the 9 year old boys. Then the 9 year old girls jump ahead again and have the same resilience as the 11 year old boys!

But then something even more surprising happens in the data. From age 10-12 the boys and girls once again have the same level of resilience. Not because the boys have caught up though. The 10 year old girls actually fell back and became less resilient to trauma than the 9 year old girls!

My data for this study comes from 52 of our OperationSAFE trauma camps in the Philippines. So I checked some statistics there and found that the median height of females overtakes that of males at age 8 and the boys don't catch up until age 13. This might explain why the girls are more resilient to trauma from age 8 because they are more confident physically. But why the sudden drop at age 10?

It turns out that age 10 is the median age for the beginning of the physical changes to the body associated with puberty and the release of the hormone estrogen. One result of these complex changes is a renewed vulnerability to trauma that sees the females once again equal to males through the rest of our study range of 6-12 year olds.

The goal of my research is to compare the children in a camp and identify which are most at risk of developing serious mental health problems. But since children are growing, we need to compare them with children at their same stage of development. AND since males and females develop at different rates we also need to take that into account.

06/09/2024

One of the first findings of my research on child trauma and resilience is that younger children are more vulnerable to mass trauma than older children.

In this study of 7,323 children, we assessed children aged 6-12 after mass trauma and can see a clear correlation between age and severity of initial post-traumatic stress symptoms. The youngest children (6-7) consistently have more severe symptoms than the middle children (8-10) who in turn have more than the older children (11-12).

This makes a lot of sense as some of the youngest group are still struggling with concepts like cause and effect or sequentiality. These little ones are transitioning from the smaller (and safer) environment of the home to the larger world of school and community. Finally, the way small children make meaning is largely by imitating the beliefs of their families. So when families are stressed by crises the young children pick up on and mimic that stress more than older children.

In contrast the older children have many more cognitive and social skills to use to try to cope with their situation. They are able to understand more of what is happening and look to friends and teachers to support them.

This finding helps us to better understand the developmental needs of children as we design tools to help them recover from trauma. Understanding how children's brains, social interactions, and faith develops makes these programs even more effective.

Once the PhD is completed, one of the areas that I would like to explore further is designing OpSAFE trauma programs specifically for toddlers or adolescents that can be used by churches in troubled regions around the world.

28/07/2024

We finished up the last day of OperationSAFE Toyama and boarded Woody for the trip back to Tokyo. Taking care of the team is a big part of OpSAFE - we had a BBQ on the last night and birthday cake for two of the team and the pastor's son.

Three things that I saw God doing,

1. The kids - everyone was commenting on the changes they were seeing in the children and how much fun they were having.

2. The community - in one of the hardest places in Japan, so many non-Christian children came and families expressed a desire to know more about Jesus.

3. The volunteers - God was working in the hearts of the student and adult volunteers, and the volunteers from the church and community.

Pray for the city of Toyama, and Trinity Church as they follow up and continue to care for their community with the love of God.