Elena on international suicide prevention program!

107. Elena - April 3, 2010 [Edit]

Being back at the fofblog makes me think about the fofpeople and one of the big problems cult members have is not knowing where they would go if they were to leave. For those who are still economically connected outside the cult it is less problematic although the “instinctive” side of the problem plays a small part in the overall decision but if that one is taken care of, it is not to be in any way undermined. I would guess that it would be of enormous help to at least sixty percent of the cult population. Or rather that it would imply that sixty percent of the major difficulties to leave are taken care of. Both statements work in their own sphere.

So ex-members with companies that could give jobs would help, a center of coordination that the cult member can contact for the mediation and all other offers from ex-members would also help. I for example could offer a place to rest for a month, a holiday vacation on the Caribbean sea.

But that concern led me to think about the problem of suicide and homicide in the different nations that I wrote about this morning and was thinking that one of the greatest things that helps young people to escape their “milieu” is traveling to other countries. If governments work together to help each other’s youth that would help the youth. Just being in a different culture helps one have relativity about one’s own culture and family and it gives one the opportunity to raise one’s self above the conditioned to the human. This was certainly my experience when I was sent to England at the age of ten, a year after my mother committed suicide. After a few months of being in the boarding school I suddenly realized that I existed! That I existed on my own and without a family and that I was alright and that all the other children who lived with me and had families were in actual fact in exactly the same position I was in. Our backgrounds stopped to matter and we became just one group of children beginning to live. That was very exiting!
Of course I was not that alone or without a family. My father paid for the school and picked us up for the holidays and was there to provide for us but that fact simply made the whole experience all the better. That “support” in every sense of the word made it all the more possible to be grateful!

It seems that we live in a time in which globalization would offer us these possibilities to exchange with each other and allow us to become more human. We do happen to love people from abroad in the Colombia I know. We’ve always “looked up” at “others” as a rare and interesting “breed”. We look with great curiosity at what other people are like which makes me think that it would be wonderful if Japanese teenagers were sent to Colombia under no matter what excuse: to learn Spanish, how to make hammocks or hats or plant coffee for two years. Two years seems a very good length of time to be able to drop the tight structures of the mother culture and allow for a more human-wide vision to their own existence but even six months would help. Those children would then return with a much greater affection for their own culture and a perspective for their own role as human beings. The same would apply for children from Germany and England, the United States and any other part of the world. We could in Colombia do very well with the income that would bring and the children would highly profit from the embrace of the Colombian family tradition in the lower classes. There is something wonderfully embracing about it, so the teenagers would be safe. My guess is that these exchanges should take place around the age of thirteen and fourteen before the strong confrontational issues with parents and society begin to surface in the more developed teenager. It is also my guess, that with that relativity incorporated, the latter confrontation would be strongly mitigated, allowing for a more human understanding of their own society and families plight.