DAR, Day 2

Stress. We talked about it all day, but I'm just going to share one aspect of it- Types of Stressors. These come in five categories:Life Events, Daily Hassles, Situational Factors, Traumatic Events, and Personality. I'm only going to discuss a couple of these, in the hopes that it will help you understand a bit better what it's like to serve overseas.

Daily Hassles- Things that bother you in daily living overseas, but things to which you adjust: registration issues; people staring and talking about you; political instability; lack of sanitation; crowded public transportation; air pollution; unavailable products; mail being stolen; unreliable internet, power and water; drunkenness; no AC; lack of appliances you had in the States; people don't keep commitments; no sense of time; no customer service; bill paying takes forever; washing clothes takes forever; no clothes drier; you can't drink water from the tap; noisy neighbors; nosy neighbors; always crowds of people; bugs; people are suspicious of you; flirting and groping of females; parasites.

For the average person, those things would go into the next category of Traumatic Events, but they are things to which a missionary just has to adjust.

Traumatic Events- An event that continues to influence thinking, feeling and behaviors: team split; interpersonal conflict; disappointment by children or spouse; war, betrayal; working with traumatized children; watching adoptees being left without being adopted;deaths of loved ones; harrassment of children; can't trust nationals; gunfire; loss of friends; HIV; sex trafficking; police; transition(I found it interesting that everyone listed transition from one country to the other as a traumatic event)

Then you have life events(marriage; deaths; movings multiple times; babies; empty nest; death of relationships; engagement; job changes; decline of parents; change of mission leadership), personality(optimist vs. pessimist; dominant vs. submissive; high vs. low structure preference; punctual vs. not; introvert vs. extrovert, etc.) and Situational Factors(tribalism; corruption; natural disasters; Neo-Nazis; poverty; visiting teams; constant demands; bribery; evidence of war; living on far less than you used to; exchange rates fluctuating; depressing winters; open worship of other religions; kids in boarding schools; language, loss of support).

And this is just to give you a glimpse of what missionaries lives are like.

Burnout= A state of mental, physiological, spiritual exhaustion brought on by long-term, unrelenting stress.


And I'll leave you with this one stat: 50% of missionaries are returning home with psychological disorders and diagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Fifty percent. One out of every two missionaries that you know is dealing with some kind of severe issue due to extreme stress and burnout.