Association Of Catholic Bloggers

Dr. Helen Scieszka's desire to heal the emotional wounds of people is a calling; it is definitely her mission. To accomplish this, she has turned her talents to Catholic fiction and uses the mighty pen as part of the healing process.   She writes from her experience as a therapist and her love of the Catholic faith in the Catholic fiction series Little Girl Lost, Little Girl Found . With each entry in the trilogy, Dr. Scieszka takes the reader on a slow, gentle, loving healing journey. She use her fiction series to address the pain of long-held emotional or physical trauma in a way that allows and encourages the reader to experience healing as well.   To read more about Dr. Scieszka's Little Girl Lost, Little Girl Found series, read the current article on her work in The Compass .        

Schools in Sierra Leone reopened today, having been closed since the Ebola outbreak in July. According to an  NPR report , "more than one-third of the 10,000+ deaths have been in Sierra Leone." When this year's harsh winter closed schools for several days in a row, some parents joked about how grueling it was to be trapped at home with stir-crazy children. Very few of us reading this blog can imagine what it's like to experience nine months of closed schools, especially amid a health crisis claiming thousands of lives. Not that long ago, in 1991, Sierra Leone faced another horrifying crisis: civil war. A month ago, I had the opportunity to listen to a survivor of that war. Ishmael Beah, author of  A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier , was forced to become a soldier in Sierra Leone at the age of thirteen. Photo courtesy of Brookfield Academy Ishmael visited my children's school, where his book is required reading for the ninth graders. Students, t