LED TO HELP ESTONIANS DURING RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR

BY CHRISTI MAYS

Just a little over a year ago, Dr. Brenda Morton and her husband, Dave, huddled around their TV, along with the rest of the world, watching tensions escalate between Russia and Ukraine. As the unrest grew and the inevitable invasion neared, she answered countless calls from concerned family and friends. “You’re not still going, are you?” they asked incredulously of her impending trip to Estonia, which borders Russia.

“Yes,” she told her loved ones.

“We both just felt like God was telling us to go,” explained Morton, who has worked as an associate professor in the College of Education for the last two years. “The state department wasn’t telling us it was unsafe to go. There was no reason not to go.”

On February 27, the pair headed to the airport just three days after the invasion that killed thousands and instigated a mass exodus of refugees to nearby countries. The missile attacks continued as they waited at their gate to take off. Putting their faith in God, Brenda and Dave left their doubt behind and boarded the plane to Estonia.

When they landed, the American Embassy was there to meet Dr. Morton. They gave her an emergency phone number for Marine Post One at the U.S. Embassy and an emergency evacuation plan to get out of the country fast—just in case. Her faith was still unwavering. There was a reason God put her in Estonia as a Fulbright Specialist at that very moment in time. She just didn’t realize how big of a purpose He had in mind.

RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME

Morton changed her clothes at Tallinn Airport and went straight to Tallinn University, where she walked into a classroom full of somber Estonians. A heaviness hung in the air. For more than 50 years, until 1991, Estonia suffered under Soviet occupation, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine conjured memories they’ve tried hard to forget.

“They see themselves in the story of the Ukrainian people because it was also their story—their shared story,” Morton explained. “So, the fact that I’m in a country dealing with a lot of historical trauma made it a unique time to be there.”

For four and a half weeks, Morton’s job was to provide educational tools and train educators and students to teach others about trauma. It was easy to see the irony in her situation, but Morton looks back now and knows it was no coincidence she was there to teach trauma. Because of funding, the pandemic, and other reasons, her trip to Estonia had been canceled or rescheduled at least three times. Still, every twist and turn in her journey led her to that exact time and place to help traumatized Estonians when they needed it most.

“God had a plan for all of this,” said Morton, who has taught classes online for Tallinn University since 2019. “There was never a time we felt like we were in danger or unsafe. If anything, we felt like God postponed this trip on three separate occasions, and He put us in this country three days after the war began. There’s a reason we’re here.”

High Anxiety

Brenda and Dave’s first encounter with Estonia was during a vacation trip to Finland in 2015. On a whim, they decided to take a ferry to visit Estonia for four days and fell in love with the country.

When she walked into that classroom last year, her heart went out to her students as she saw the tension and fear on their faces.

“I had a student that started to cry, which is culturally unheard of,” she said. “Students were asking permission to have their phones out because they wanted to be able to contact relatives if the sirens went off and we needed to take shelter. I even had a student who asked to bring her baby to class the next day because she didn’t want to be more than seven minutes away from her child. You could feel the anxiety and stress in the country was just palpable.”

Unimaginable Journey

Morton didn’t just decide on a whim to do trauma training.

“I thought I did, but there’s no way. I see that God prepared me to come to this place at this time to do this particular work.”

God began preparing her more than a decade earlier when Morton was finishing her last year as a high school teacher.

“I had a foster child in one of my English courses. I didn’t know anything about foster care, and the more I got to know these kids and their backstories, I felt like God was asking us to become foster parents.”

She and Dave set out to learn more. They went through the foster training and filled out all the forms.

“God’s got a sense of humor,” she recalled with a chuckle. “We asked to foster one child, a girl, and we wanted her to be younger than my youngest child. God sent us a sibling group of four!”

What she learned during her experience as a foster parent became the basis for her dissertation on foster care. “No one is talking about trauma when it comes to these foster kids,” she discovered. “I started asking questions, and nobody knew the answers. I realized that these are kids hidden in plain sight.”

Eager to learn more, she enrolled in a postdoc certification program in trauma and started working with the Oregon Department of Human Services doing advocacy around foster care.

Two years before coming to UMHB, Morton worked as a professor at George Fox University in Oregon. She was named a Fulbright Scholar to Estonia and spent seven months at the University of Tartu. While there, a friend at the U.S. Embassy encouraged her to apply to come back again and continue her work as a Fulbright Specialist, which is how she ended up in Estonia last February to teach trauma-informed practices.

But her story didn’t end there.

Finding Her Way To Umhb

After her trip as a Fulbright Scholar to Estonia, the couple began looking to move to Texas, where their oldest daughter had moved. As Morton began exploring opportunities, she was also working on a research project that connected her to Dr. Aida Ramos, who had worked as an associate professor in the College of Humanities and Sciences at UMHB. It was then that Morton learned about UMHB and an open teaching position in the College of Education.

“When I interviewed, I thought, ‘Wow, this is an amazing group of people.’ At the time, I was inter-viewing at several other institutions and didn’t feel the same about them. When I came to the UMHB campus, I walked away feeling like there’s something different here.”

After joining UMHB two years ago, she received a research grant that allowed her to interview 55 foster care students enrolled in a Texas college or university. The research is the basis for another book she is writing about children in the system and their experiences getting into college. She plans to use the book in her trauma class at UMHB as part of the educational advocacy program.

“There are a lot of barriers to them being successful, and all of that is trauma-based,” she said.

More To Come

Since she began working with Estonians, Morton has helped train more than 300 Estonian teachers on trauma. She also recently began a new project with a friend at the University of Tartu, creating a video series on trauma-informed practices, and will be offering a trauma class at UMHB next fall and spring. Most recently at UMHB, she wrote the curriculum for the first study-abroad trip to Estonia and is preparing to take her first group of students in May 2024.

“I’m super excited! We will use the University of Tartu as our home base, and I’ll take them to see what a community church looks and feels like, which is very different than anything experienced here.”

When Morton reflects on the path God put her on to help Estonians through one of their most difficult times, she feels overwhelmed out of sheer humility.

“It was a blessing to be able to do something to be helpful—a great feeling like I was able to do something to help both the Estonian people and the Ukrainians in a country that was dealing with so much. All of it was just a blessing.”

When she’s not training horses or giving lessons at her training facility in Belton, Megan Kenney ’14 loves competing with her blackAndalusian stallion, Dante.