The After Dinner Mint

When You're Angry You're the One to Fix Everything: An Interview with Jill


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Welcome to Season 2 of Stories I’d Tell You at Dinner!  We are chatting with the delightful Jill, who is a GP and cross-cultural worker in the Middle East. She is also one of our writers here at Stories. We explore the cross-section of burnout, compassion fatigue, and secondary traumatic stress, but basically: what happens when you feel like you’re being dumped by a wave, angry that you’re the one to fix it all, as well as how Jill found a richer and deeper faith on the other side of it.

Jill grew up in Albany, studied in Perth & Sydney but now lives with three beautiful girl friends in a big ugly city in the Middle East. She helps lead a team doing community health programs and works as a GP with Syrian refugees. Learning Arabic was the hardest thing she’s undertaken. In her work she’s passionate about seeing the unseen people and helping Arab woman and teenagers learn emotional literacy and their God given identity. She enjoys textures, colours, photography and laughing at ridiculous ideas. This is a big year of transitions as she’s getting married in May, to an American!

In today's episode, we explore:

  • The joys of living cross-culturally, chaotic home visits, and learning to crack jokes in a new culture and language.
  • Growing up in a Christian family, becoming a Christian as a child, and always being the “good” one.
  • Moving to the Middle East as a cross-cultural worker, GP and community health worker.
  • Walking through a season of burnout and compassion fatigue and how she found a deeper and richer faith on the other side of it.

You can check out the show notes for everything mentioned in the episode.

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Music: Come Back by Ketsa. Licensed under a Creative Commons License Non-Commercial, No-Derivatives 4.0 International License.

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The After Dinner MintBy Stories I'd Tell You at Dinner