The name of Ina Watson kept cropping up in conversations with friends in Kandy. “You should meet her,” they told me so when I heard that the Watson family would be leaving the island shortly, after four years during which they made friends and influenced many people, I took the opportunity.
Ina’s husband, Rev. Paul, has served as Asst. Curate of St. Paul’s Church, Kandy, and Ina’s counselling skills have been greatly valued in the community. Both of them have made an impact with their quiet, friendly, disarming manner.
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| Ina came into the counselling field quite by chance |
Those who have followed Ina’s Counsellor Training Courses in Kandy speak of the rapport she establishes with her students and her singular ability to impart her own knowledge and to infuse the trainees with enthusiasm for this calling.
Ina came into the counselling field quite by chance. After she had her first baby she had felt confined to her home in Scotland during the first three months and one evening her husband had taken her to a nearby pub. Noticing a signboard which announced diploma courses in Counsellor Training, on impulse she had walked in and enrolled. It appears that she found her niche.
In Sri Lanka, it was only when the tsunami hit that Ina’s talent for helping grieving or troubled people came into the open. I learned that Ina had gone to the south and to the east and worked with traumatized people, through interpreters, and been a source of comfort and strength to many.
“I did a trauma counselling workshop in Trincomalee in January 2004,” she said, “and later another one with children. The January workshop was very moving as the aftermath of the tsunami was still visible all around us. People who themselves had been traumatized, came forward to offer themselves as volunteer counsellors.
“As is my style of teaching, I wanted to equip the counsellors to find their own inner strengths and resources, so that they could help others. It was good to see them de-brief, as they learnt,” she said.
How had these women responded to a foreigner who didn’t speak their language? “Those who came, mainly Tamil people and some Sinhala folk, seemed open to a foreigner. I think it depends on the type of foreigner – if you come with a superior attitude, it won’t work. By that time, we were already comfortable in Sri Lanka. In fact, I myself felt very defensive about foreigners who came to ‘our’ land and were patronizing and overwhelming about the AID they were bringing!”
Ina focuses on what is known as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) and has a ‘CBT Skills Manual for Sri Lanka’ which she has freely shared with her students. She emphasizes the fact that the whole counselling process involves growth and change.
Of German descent, Ina lived her early years in Germany. Her father had died when she was very young and some years later her mother married an Englishman and the family moved to England when she was seven. She holds a degree in Theology from St. Andrews University in Scotland where she later obtained her Master’s degree as well. In 1986-87 she taught at the International School in Ooty, India, and also did a stint in the Gandaki Boarding School at the foothills of the Anapurna range in Nepal.
She met Paul Watson at St. Andrew’s and they married in 1990. Paul himself was born to missionary parents in India and his desire was to serve in Asia after ordination. Wanting to be sure that Ina too would be happy with such a decision, Paul had urged her to attend a work camp in Bangladesh when their two daughters were four and two years old. “I spent four weeks in a village, building a house and having fellowship with the young people there. I prayed much, as did Paul, about whether we should go overseas and when I came back home we were both convinced that God was calling us to missions.” So, two years later, they took the two girls and went to Bangladesh. “We spent another year there until the CMS approached us about Sri Lanka.” The girls, Abigail who is 13 now, and 11-year-old Hannah, have fitted in well here and are sorry to leave.
The Watsons will bid goodbye to Sri Lanka on December 19. Paul will serve in a church in Aberdeen and I have no doubt that, once they have settled in, Ina will find ample scope for using her own gifts in the church and community there. |
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