Twilla Welch

Creative in Struggle Twilla Welch

Creative in Struggle is the true and frank account of the author's experience of teaching Karen students in a refugee camp on the Thai/Burma border. It presents actual events but does not reduce them down to a mere chronology. Instead, it charts a challenging reflection on the frailties of being a helper, the weaknesses of being a Westerner, and a realization of the lived meaning of spiritual freedom, even when they are painful to admit. Interspersed between the author's chapters are essays written by the students themselves. The essays tell their stories, in their words, of what it means to be an oppressed and targeted, tortured and hunted, silenced and displaced people. Although the story is an intensely personal one, through the articulation of the inner psyche, the reader is moved from a safe and distant place of the observer, into one which, at times, feels incredibly close, utterly naked, and frighteningly vulnerable. The reader is compelled to consider the implications of freedom, of oppression, and of personal responsibility. Creative in Struggle brings to the forefront of our minds, and to the center of our hearts, one unavoidable and self-evident truth; that their freedom and ours are, indeed, inextricably linked.