Memoir recalls the trauma of civil war

DAVE EAGLES STAFF REPORTER dave_eagles@kamloopsthisweek.com

A Kamloops woman has written a book of her experiences as a social worker — Indelible: A Social Worker in the Wake of Civil War .

Driven by a longstanding desire, her education and her faith, mental-health professional Wendy Nordick and husband Bill Blair, a retired judge, plunged into a two-year assignment with Canadian University Services Overseas (CUSO).

Nordick said she was motivated to take on the challenge of working overseas from a random newspaper ad she had clipped out, tossed into a desk and rediscovered many years later.

The couple signed up for training before receiving their posting with CUSO in Sri Lanka.

Nordick and her husband landed in the southern mountain village of Newark Eliya in

2011, just two years after the end of a bloody, 25-year-long civil war.

Nordick said she believes her 25 years of clinical social work equipped her with the necessary skills to provide assistance to a country that, at the time, was experiencing the highest suicide rate in the world — the effects of decades of civil war.

There, she began working as a liaison between the hospital and community, educating health-care workers with strategies for caring for the traumatized population.

Nordick said they worked in a hospital, which was formerly an old building used as a brewery.

She said when the opportunity came up to relocate her work to the city of Jaffna, the decision was made and, within that year, they made the transition.

At the time, Jaffna was a bombed-out shell of a city, the result of experiencing long - standing discrimination and violent persecution against the Sri Lankan Tamils by the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan government.

The war began in 1983 and lasted nearly three decades, ending in May 2009.

Nordick said she got to work teaching a trauma team, which would head out into the community helping those who were suffering as a result of imprisonment and torture from the years of warring.

While training teams to deliver services in the field, Nordick said she was quickly humbled after becoming acutely aware of the war’s devastating impact on people.

“It was during those group sessions that I realized my team had suffered severe trauma from the war. My therapists were traumatized themselves,” she said.

It led Nordick to seek ways to better serve those with whom she was training, to provide

help to others.

Through a connection with Dr. Daya Somasundaram, a senior professor of psychiatry at the faculty of medicine at University of Jaffna, and a consultant psychiatrist working in northern Sri Lanka, Nordick found ways in which she could blend her Western knowledge of care and healing with that of her learned cultural knowledge.

Now, more than a decade later, Nordick said she felt the time was right to write a book to share her personal account of her time volunteering abroad.

Having regularly posted blogs during her time in Sri Lanka, Nordick said the accounts were quite general in their content, noting many people followed her experiences during that time.

She said that when sharing conversations about her experiences there, people can never really get the full understanding of what it was like.

“We had this experience that I felt compelled to talk about and to bring [my] blog posts out,” Nordick said.

“This book is more about my actual work because I’m a social worker.”

Indelible: A Social Worker in the Wake of Civil War was published by Austin Macauley Publishers and will be released on Aug. 18.

For many people in Kamloops, Wayne Brennan was known as the “bottle guy.” For more than 20 years, he was seen on city streets, pushing a cart filled with bottles and cans he had collected. He died of heat-related complications on June 30, 2021, during the heat dome. This weekend, Wayne’s brother, John Brennan, is organizing a bottle drive in his late sibling’s memory, with proceeds going to the Kamloops Food Bank.