Befrienders Worldwide Conference 2024

As President of Samaritans in Spain, I was honoured to participate in the Befrienders Worldwide Conference 2024, held in Columbo, Sri Lanka.

The roots of Befrienders Worldwide (BW) can be traced back to Samaritans UK, which established Befrienders International, a crucial platform for coordinating ‘befriending’ agencies in over 40 countries.

Globally, more than 700,000 people die due to suicide every year, with 20 times that number making a suicide attempt.  In fact, suicide is the fourth leading cause of death globally among 15-29-year-olds, and 77 per cent of global suicides occur in low and middle-income countries.

Each of these individuals is someone’s child, someone’s sister or brother, partner, husband or wife, someone’s parent, loved one or friend.  It is no surprise that suicide has a ripple effect that impacts families, friends, colleagues, communities and societies.

However, suicide is preventable, and we, alongside the other members of Befrienders Worldwide, support the World Health Organisation (WHO) in their goal to reduce the global rate by a third by 2030.

Samaritans in Spain speaks at Befrienders Worldwide Conference

This conference provided a vital link that connected BW members from all over the world from different cultures and ethnicities. The Inauguration Ceremony was a truly cultural occasion, with male and female dancers in traditional costumes and the lighting of the symbolic tree. This ensured that light shone upon us as we came together to learn from each other and forge new connections.

In addition to attending as a delegate, I was privileged to be chosen as one of the speakers.  I was able to share a little more about Samaritans in Spain and how we work and speak on a new initiative we have undertaken.

Thanks to a collaboration with the Santiago Embassy of Chile, we can now provide our services to English speakers residing in Chile.  Before this, they had nowhere to turn to besides the Embassy, which felt ill-equipped to handle such delicate matters.

Befrienders Worldwide Conference connections

During my time at the conference, I heard from renowned professors specialising in suicidology and learnt just how truly important ‘active listening’ is as a suicide prevention tool.  I was humbled by the extreme situations and personal trauma that some of the organisations were responding to with kindness and emotional support daily.

I met a tenacious lady in her eighties from an organisation in Sri Lanka who introduced online training when the pandemic prevented her from conducting face-to-face training. She described how she didn’t really understand the online world and turned to her grandchildren to assist her in what she believed was possible.  I also heard from an organisation located in Lebanon that has been developing an evaluation tool to measure the effectiveness of their presence.

Befrienders Worldwide members fellowship dinner

Each workshop I attended brought new ideas, discoveries, and ways of doing things. Not everything was agreed upon, but healthy debates and discussions ensued, bringing us all ever closer. Something truly magical happens when like-minded people come together, and all egos are put to one side. It made no difference the role we played in our organisation; we all had an equal voice, which I found to be truly inspiring.

It wasn’t all serious, though, as our hosts ensured that we also had some fun. To this end, they organised a fellowship dinner for us all at a neighbouring hotel. Here, we were further entertained by cultural dances, each telling a different story, as well as music and acrobatics.  We enjoyed good food, interesting conversations,  games, and lots of dancing as the band played.  New friendships were cemented with joy and laughter as we all came together as one.

During the conference, the Welsh term ‘cynefin’ (pronounced kuh-nev-in) was used to describe us as a community, and I couldn’t agree more. I may have attended as the only representative from Spain, but it never felt that way.  We were kindred spirits, merging effortlessly and speaking the ‘same language’.