Book Description

"In the Lions Mouth is essential reading for scholars and field workers advancing humanitarian aid and human rights in the developing world. The book also provides cogent insight and information for clinicians who implement community mental health." Dr. David Swanger, Professor Emeritus, University of. California, Santa Cruz "This book reminds us that precursors of counseling and therapy have been in practice for thousands of years around the world and that counseling was not a Euro-American invention of the last few decades. Lewis Aptekar brings us with him as he seeks to reframe counseling and therapy 'outside the envelope'" Dr Paul B. Pedersen, Professor Emeritus, Syracuse University "Lewis Aptekar is one of the few scholars who places respect for the reality experienced by the people he studies above the illusion of the categories used in humanitarian aid. This ethical principle guides him and confronts him with dilemmas that an intelligent inquirer cannot avoid when facing people in difficult situations." Dr. Daniel Stoecklin, Professor, Institut Universitaire Kurt Bosh, IUKB, Childrens Rights Unit, Sion, Switzerland Can you imagine yourself living in Kaliti, a displaced person's camp in Ethiopia because you want to know what it's like to be such a person in such a place? But it's not just curiosity that takes you there. You are a skilled, well-practiced observer of human behavior in situ, so you know what to look for, what to record. And you are a first-class writer, easy to read, whose accounts of what he saw and heard are transmitted with enough detail, enough conveying of emotion that the reader is simultaneously moved while being informed, that you feel as if you, too, are there, in this camp in Ethiopia. The author of this compelling account of the strengths and weaknesses of humanitarian aid programs as exemplified by this particular but not atypical instance is Lewis Aptekar. This book is, in my opinion, as good as his earlier two classics, Street Children of Cali (1988) and Emotional Disasters in Global perspective (1994). Dr. Marshall Segall, Professor Emeritus, Syracuse University