If there was one takeaway message from the ADAMS 1st Annual Healthy Families Retreat on Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018 it was that you never stop learning: whether that’s learning how to be a better spouse, parent, daughter, son, or sibling. Many attendees at the retreat shared the sentiment that people can always improve themselves in their role as a family member-no community is perfect and if we want to improve our community we must first look to ourselves.
The day-long seminar was organized by the ADAMS center and designed to highlight the need to have a conversation about having healthy families in the Muslim community and to encourage dialogue about difficult issues that people might be facing at home.
Seminar topics included: talking to our children about difficult issues, elements of a healthy home, building connection through stronger communication, and conflict resolution understanding. The event also had workshops, activities and Q&A for adults, children, and youth in separate simultaneous sessions. A total of 25 couples participated in the adult group, while the children and youth had 10 participants each.
For a long time now the organizers of the event have seen a strong need to support members in the Muslim community in finding the right partner, maintaining a marriage, raising their kids, and helping them develop healthy families. The parents will then pass on that wisdom to their kids, who will pass it on to the next generation.
Suheir Kafri, one of the event organizers, believes in providing holistic care to our community. As a social worker at ADAMS, she sees a lot of family issues and many of them have to do with communication, mental health-issues that are taboo, mixing of cultures and the difficulties that arise from this, for example, children born in the states while older generations are trying to acculturate. Kafri sees venues like this as an opportunity to provide clarity and discussion, a place where families can feel unified by coming together and listening to the same message.
Sohaira Sultan, also one of the event organizers, is the Marriage Services Coordinator at Adams. She strongly feels that people are feeling disconnected-whether that be with the masjid or in their marriages. For Sultan, this event was about reconnecting community members with themselves and helping them build connections with other like-minded community members, so they feel well supported. It’s an opportunity to grow a connection with the masjid and the imams who work there.
Many participants at the seminar benefitted from coming to the event and said that they learned a lot and felt that having a small gathering allowed them to feel safe speaking freely. Some even came to hug the event organizers at the end of the event and thank them for putting the event together.
Although the overall feedback was positive, there were some things the organizers and guest speaker’s thought should be done differently next year. Iman Elkadi, one of the guest speakers, is a licensed clinical social worker and the on-site clinical therapist at Adams. She believes that smaller seminars should be held several times throughout the year, in addition to an annual or even semi-annual occurrence. Getting an earlier start on preparation was also something she suggested for next year, as it took a toll on the overstretched staff members at Adams organizing this event.
Yasmin Elhady, another guest speaker at the event, runs a relationship consultancy. She has been a matchmaker for 11 years, as well as a practicing attorney and a stand-up comedian. She believes that having pre-submitted questions during Q&A might also help those who have reservations about asking questions and allow others to benefit from the answers. In her work helping people get married she has learned a lot about what our community is ailing from and what we can do to be better. She sees this event as a place to discuss solutions that have worked and ask difficult questions about what’s not working.
One of the hopes for this event, shared by both the event organizers and guest speakers alike, was to reduce the stigma around the taboo topics in the Muslim community. Events like this give people a platform to have deep connected conversations about the problems we are having in the community. Problems exist in Muslim communities just like they do in others. People need to feel comfortable talking about them.
Sultan hopes that this event will teach attendee’s preventative measures and proper decision-making skills that they can pass on. She calls it “pro-active love.”
According to Sultan, “If we understand what we need to do for ourselves and each other in the community then we can be stronger. Stronger individuals means stronger homes. And stronger homes means strong communities.”
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