We have had the blessing of Dwight Carlson, a psychiatrist, visiting this week to run anger and forgiveness groups in Philippi for CHE (Community Health Evangelist) workers and the youth from the church. This last week he left the people with some great tools on how to deal with their anger and this coming week he will share about forgiveness. It was very freeing for the people of Philippi to hear that anger is an ok emotion. After processing that anger is ok, Dwight gave the people healthy steps to finding a solution to Anger.

His steps include:
Recognizing your angry, waiting before responding, praying, identifying why you are angry, evaluating if you have the right to be angry, confronting the person, forgiving the person and then hopefully finding resolution.

The hope is that the information he shared was received in such a way that the people who heard it could share it with more people. Already we have had reports that people are talking about anger and how to resolve it with their families.

It has been so encouraging to be with the people of Philippi, they are so intelligent and are so open, there is so much growth here!

(CHE is the health ministry that teaches AIDS awareness and other health issues. The CHE model is to train people who will train others, who will train others, and so on. The goal is multiplication.)

The end of this last week we had the opportunity to lead games at the Orphan Support Group, before Dwight did his talk on anger. The youth were so much fun! Matthew began the time with his announcer voice and got some great reactions from the youth. Some of you are familiar with the "sit" game, where you get everyone in a tight circle all turned the same direction and then have them sit at the same time. We all had a lot of fun playing and falling as we found it difficult to support each others weight. But eventually we got it to work:)

During Dwights talk with the youth the kids asked a lot of great questions, including if it is ok to be angry with God. Many of these youth have parents who had died of aids and some of them respond to that with anger towards God. We think there are many different ways people respond to this question. As we talked about it we found that we wanted to know what others think, please share your thoughts with us by clicking the comments link below.

The camera saga continues as we just got the camera working and then somehow deleted all the pictures we had managed to take!!

Thank you for sharing in our adventure.

Matt and Leslie