By Taylor Luck

AMMAN - Often faced with long hours and limited resources, social worker Sana Ratrout said her profession is sometimes overlooked.

The Ministry of Social Development caseworker was among some 90 social workers who graduated from an intensive course on casework from the Columbia University Middle East Research Centre earlier this week.

The ministry is working to provide more support for social workers, the unsung heroes staffing the Kingdom’s clinics and rehabilitation centres, according to Minister of Social Development Hala Lattouf.

“These workers are essential to our future plans,” she told The Jordan Times at the graduation ceremony on Tuesday.

The course is part of overall plans by the ministry, along with the Jordan River Foundation and the National Centre for Family Affairs, to revamp the sector, she said.

The ministry is also working with academia to develop universal standards and best practices to be taught in classrooms of higher education institutions across the Kingdom, according to Lattouf.

“The people they serve are the most vulnerable - victims of violence and other trauma, and you need very good people to reach out to them,” she said.

“Social work is the light you use to measure whether a society is strong. If the sector is healthy, then the society itself is healthy,” Lattouf said, noting that the ministry is currently meeting with stakeholders, authorities, forensics experts and members of the judiciary to outline a code of ethics to be used in the sector.

She pointed out that the course, “Foundations for Social Work Practice”, has graduated 200 workers and supervisors in the last six months.

The 12-day non-accredited Columbia University course was specifically designed to support those staffing centres across the Kingdom, which have become a haven for the vulnerable who are often badly in need of such services.

Columbia University professors Robin Gearing, Michael MacKenzie and Craig Schwalbe spent three months adapting a graduate-level lesson plan to be applicable to issues workers face in Jordanian society.

Role-play is a central feature of the course in order for participants to have the opportunity to apply their new skills to make mistakes and achieve successes, they said.

The professors, who are also career social workers, said they were “very inspired” by classroom discussions, and will take back several lessons they learned in the Kingdom.

The three professors, who toured dozens of public and private agencies to learn about different outreach services provided across the country, said they were struck by the “utmost professionalism” and “passion” with which Jordanian social workers serve their local communities.

They noted that despite different approaches in the Kingdom’s regions, the country faces the same challenges as the West when reaching out to and treating the most vulnerable.

“We were struck by the commonalities of social issues they deal with,” Schwalbe said.

For their part, participants said they learned a wide array of new approaches they will incorporate in their work.

“The role-play was extremely helpful in knowing how to ask the right questions, how to find the root cause of someone’s problems,” Ratrout told The Jordan Times.

“We learned that sometimes what we are seeing are the symptoms of a problem and not its root cause. Now we will be able to better diagnose cases and treat individuals coming to our centre,” she said.

Majdi Hamdan, who works for Mubarat Um Al Hussein, said that through the sessions he saw common challenges societies are facing in both the private and public sectors.

For ministry social worker Fadwa Abu Leil, the course served as an opportunity to network, as many charitable societies have never had contact with each other despite working in the same sectors.

“We face the same problems, work with the same issues and we never talked to each other. Now we are learning each other’s ways of doing things,” she noted.

“At the university level, all we learn are theories; all we can do is listen without having the chance to try different methods out. This approach really opened our eyes,” said a social worker from the Royal Medical Services, who preferred to remain unnamed.

Jeanette Takamura, dean of the Columbia University School of Social Work, believes that with national strategies and emphasis placed on the sector, the Kingdom will take a leading role in the region.

“Jordan will have a strong and empowered social services sector which will lead through the use in research that will inform the practice around the world,” she said during the graduation ceremony.

Ratrout agreed.

“We have the skills. We have the know-how. With a little planning, we can do anything,” she said.