They don't want to die

By Feizal Samath

Terminally-ill people, whose death is inevi- table, often commit suicide after a drug overdose and some of them pick up a phone and talk to the local branch of Befrienders International, sharing those last moments with someone, as they die.

"There will be many callers who'll die on the phone. They phone up after taking an overdose.

"They just want someone to talk to as they die. I can't prove it (callers are often anonymous) because they may as well have just fallen asleep - while we are talking on the phone. To make sure that those last moments are not alone it's very important to them," says Paul Smith, who has experienced such calls. Smith is chairman of Befrienders International (BI), the international London-based movement helping the suicidal and despairing, and along with BI's hard-working Director-General Vanda Scott attended an Asian region workshop in Colombo.

"When you have a terminally ill person on the phone, it is often their last moment and they are reflective. They have come to terms with the inevitability of death. They don't want to die alone. They don't want to die in pain," Scott said in a joint interview.

From the people that she has worked with, Scott finds that those in the later stages of their lives have been some of the strongest and the bravest.

"We don't talk people out of suicide. Obviously we would like if they didn't. We are there to help and listen. Not judge. Maybe we can get them to see life in a different way but not to actually set out to persuade them not do to (whatever they intend to do) or commit suicide," Smith chipped in.

Scott says that such people want to be "touched". They want to be emotionally touched, physically touched, psychologically touched. They don't want to be isolated. They don't want to die alone. At least 850,000 to one million people in the world kill themselves in despair every year with the commonest form of suicide being a drug overdose or drinking poison.

But that's just a part of the problem.

As more and more people become suicide-prone arising out of stressful situations, BI is starting from the classroom and reaching out to children to teach them how to cope with everyday living.

Denmark has been chosen for a project in which BI will identify basic coping skills for very young children. The project will look at the role of the extended family, the role of the grandparent and if this system is not available, to whom do young people turn to when they need to talk to or seek advise from someone who is near and dear to them.

Scott said that BI was working with psychologists and psychiatrists to identify some of the key factors in the project which would then be put together for five to eight year-olds as a story in the form of a play video or cartoon.

"We would then present it in classrooms and kids' networks for a period of three months and make an assessment of the impact. But what we can't do is ascertain what effect it would have perhaps 25 years later," she said. "If youngsters are able to go home with the message and tell their parents that we had this wonderful game that we played, then we may be getting somewhere."

The BI director-general, who made the keynote address at the Asian workshop, brought the audience to almost tears after relating a visit earlier this month to a Sri Lanka village, which has the highest rate of suicides in the country. "We met Hema in her small, bare hut. She seemed to be happy and pleased with the visit as she spoke to BI's local staff in a language I could not understand. Although she was smiling and had a pleasant disposition, I could gauge that there was something wrong here.

"She had lost four members of her family - her husband, two sons and a daughter-in-law - through suicides. She was living with another son and looked forward to visits by our staff," Scott said, adding that the visit was one of the most moving experiences in her life.

Right Royal shock

How about this for a cavalier attitude? A passenger flying Royal Jordanian Airlines from New York to Colombo had a stopover in Amman. Nothing seemed amiss, and on landing in Colombo, the passenger chose the ''green line'' at the customs as he had secured all his luggage from the conveyor belt. But, it seems his travails began after his travels were over.

When he opened the bags on arriving home, he found that the bags had been forced open, and that a valuable hand phone which had been inside it was missing. Another foreign item, not of any use to the passenger, had been introduced into the bag. Though the passenger promptly complained by telephone to airline staff, he was told that the airline was not responsible since the complaint should have been made before the passenger left the airport. But, how was the traveller to know that something was missing inside his bags?

He said he had no reason to re-open them before passing customs.

Nonchalantly, the airline informed the passenger that another fellow traveller had also found a handphone missing from her luggage, and that nothing could be done about it. Obviously, there seems to be an organised operation of pilfering luggage, most probably at the transit point of Amman. But who cares? The Airline prefers to stick to the rules. If the passenger didn't know his bags had been tampered with, let him face the consequences. Ignorance is bliss, what?

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