By Andrew Costa
Citizen Staff
February 2003

Shawnigan Lake resident Adrienne Carter has done a lot of traveling during the last four years.

Kosovo, Kashmir and Sri Lanka - not typical travel spots for most Canadians but the destinations of choice for Carter, a mental health counsellor who has donated much of her time to teach trauma counselling in some the world's most dangerous places.

Carter, who works at the Child and Youth Mental Health Centre in Victoria, decided in 1999 that she wanted to help those grieving from the ethnic wars and NATO bombing in Yugoslavia. "It was hard to know how to help but then I found Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) and they had recently begun a mental health program," she said. "I was accepted and placed in a (small town in Kosovo called) Prizren."

Carter, who obtained a three-month leave of absence from her job, was part of a small team that went to Prizren which included one other mental health specialist. They arrived just as ethnic Albanian residents were returning home  by foot from refugee camps in Macedonia.

"When the refugees were returning what they found was total chaos," she said. "The town wasn't completely destroyed but it had been taken over by the army."

In Prizren, Carter helped select a group of doctors, nurses, social workers and school counsellors to train in trauma therapy.

"All of them were traumatized themselves and part of their training program was looking at their own trauma," she said. "We did a lot of role playing to learn to deal with trauma."

During the role-playing exercises one "beautiful young nurse" took up the role of a mother who's husband had fled to the mountains and whose father was executed in front of her and her six children.

"She took the children and walked for four days towards the Albanian refugee camps with no food," she said. "She encountered wounded people all over the place but couldn't help because she had to take care of her six children."

Carter said that as the nurse's story unfolded the group began to understand that she wasn't role playing. She was telling the story of her own life.

"We realized she needed a lot more counselling of her own," she said. Another student of Carter's was a doctor who saw things so horrible he fell into a bitter depression and often had thoughts of suicide. "The training program gave him a reason to live," she said. "It gave him a renewed sense of purpose."

After three months in Prizren Carter returned to her Shawnigan home and Victoria job, but she was hooked. She returned to Kosovo for another month in 2000 and then took another leave of absence in 2001 to teach trauma counselling in Kashmir, a disputed mountainous area on the northern border of India and Pakistan.

"It's a 19- or 20-year war and it's an all-out battle," she said. "We had to do counselling in the middle of grenade attacks."

Carter said the largest number of her students in the city of Srinigar were Muslims but some Sikhs and Ba'hais also took part in the training. "Normally they don't get along but they were all together in the training program," Carter said. "I'm a Baha'i myself but it didn't cause any difficulty and I learned so much about (the Muslim and Sikh) way of thinking and worshiping."

Dealing with sexual abuse was a large part of the trauma training in Kashmir, which Muslim men and women insisted on receiving separately from each other, she said.

"I was in a room with about 15 devout Muslim men and I just finished a lecture on various forms of sexual abuse and I had to give it without looking them in the eye," Carter said. "There was deep silence for a while, then one man started talking about being taken when he was a boy and how everything I talked about had happened to him. Probably about half of the men shared similar stories. It was very powerful and my translator was overcome with emotions and had to leave the room several times."

In 2002, Carter renewed her efforts with a three-month stint helping refugees in war-torn Sri Lanka. The island nation off the coast of India was also embroiled in a decades-old civil war between minority Hindu Tamil rebels and the majority Buddhist Sinhalese army.

"There were thousands of displaced people with horrendous living conditions in the refugee camps," Carter said. "The family structure had completely broken down. It was an incredibly difficult situation. Sixty-four thousand people have been killed in the most horrendous way."

One problem Carter faced in Sri Lanka was the tremendous grief felt by parents whose children were abducted and forced to serve in the army. "They were taken away as young as 10 years old and many parents never saw them again," she said.

Although peace talks are now ongoing in Sri Lanka and the conflict in Kosovo appears to have settled down, Carter still feels the calling and hopes to embark on another volunteer mission with Doctors Without Borders sometime soon.

"Unfortunately our world has so many hot spots where mental health programs are going into, places like Sierra Leone and Sudan," she said. "The question is whether I will be allowed to take a leave of absence again with the changes in the Ministry (of Children and Family Development)."

Carter's proud of what she was able to accomplish in all three locations and hopes she's able to help other people in war-ravaged nations deal with trauma.

"It was a large amount we were able to do in a very short time and the stories I heard in all three places I worked would blow your mind," she said. "They were like the concentration camps in Europe during the Second World War."

Doctors Without Borders is an independent, privately funded, neutral volunteer organization that offers medical assistance in areas suffering from violent conflict, disease and natural disasters. For more information, visit the organization's web site at www.msf.ca or in Vancouver at (604) 743-0673.