I'll say first off that I don't have that experience, but others on here have.

It sounds like the reprieve of coming home has allowed you to realize just how much you are affected by what you have been through and what you have witnessed.

It's amazing what your mind can do to hold you together while you are in the circumstance.

Look up "grounding exercizes" for some help with moment to moment help.

Is there any way you can postpone going back? It is noble to have the desire to help, but you need to take care of yourself to sustain that.

Haven't been to Kenya, but I have experienced culture shock from living in other countries. Never thought of it that way, but, yeah, I guess the difference between culture shock and PTSD is pretty hazy. The effects of culture shock are even less acknowledged than the effects of PTSD.

And then there are the stresses of mission work and/or volunteer work. I have experienced that crash and burn without leaving home. In my skin, I think it is quite different from culture shock.

And it grieves me that I know of nothing that is available for either one. Not even with my fellow volunteers and wanderers. The best I have found is to treat the symptoms as they arise.

Small steps.

The step in front of you is whether to get on that plane tomorrow. I might suggest it is a choice between self-care and completing your mission. Not an easy choice. I will be praying with you today.

I spent a day in Northern Morocco when I was 19. For decades my memories of that day was so unpleasant that it remains one of the horrors of my life. The open and hostile misogyny, also openly anti American sentiments and I witnessed violence and unthinkable poverty towards children. It was quite horrible. My rape thee that day was the horror I felt but repressed. Then projected my horror feelings onto a general unpleasant experience of a very foreign culture, rather than remembering my personal misfortune.

I've spent time in Southern Mexico also with extremely poor Mexican friends. Yet this dirt, poverty and the death of a baby, work strikes & a riot, & golf ball size hail, dysentery, showers with four inch insects still was not horrific because I was with supportive friends.

I would ask you what are you experiencing away from Africa that leaves you feeling unable to ever return? You can see my life reference wants to compare to yours. Did you have a tragedy in Kenya similar to mind?

Culture shock left me exhausted, lonely and feeling lost from myself when I lived in Europe, a place not so different from the US. But there too I was very alone, didn't speak German well and had no sympathetic friends. Feeling isolated while in a foreign land makes the culture shock far worse.

Would it help to process with us? Would you explain further what are your symptoms of PTSD that have you in a crisis? Are you feeling alone and unconnected in Africa? Or did more happen to hurt you than feelings of being a stranger in a strange land?

Of course share only what makes you feel safe. But you are in sympathetic company it you choose to share. Peace to you.

Hi. I grew up as a missionary kid in South America during the dictatorships of the 1970s. My family's church had as many difficulties internally as the country did at that time, and my family, unfortunately, succumbed to PTSD by taking it out on each other. Which is why I'm here now.

I'm 54, and felt the call to ministry, too, but chose to emphasize the healing end of ministry and the more one on one aspect of it by becoming a professional hospital chaplain. By then I'd had a lot of therapy for my own PTSD, and so my having had it became a resource for helping others, especially patients in the ER and their families and friends.

I had to quit 2 years ago as I got Chronic Kidney Disease, CKD. I now function at 50% kidney capacity--enough not to have to have dialysis (thankfully) or a transplant (thankfully). But no more running around hospitals and ERs for me. Now I teach nurses at a community college and love it. And love coming here.

After I grew up on the mission field, I had a college friend in USA in the later 1970s who had been raised on the mission field, too--in his case, in Kenya. He'd gone to the Rift Valley Academy school there, and loved Kenya deeply. It was rough, though; his father had died there in a freak fire accident concerning a camp stove.

I've continued to lead missions trips over the years in my own ministry as an adult, so I can still imagine ways in which you may feel shell shocked. Not only that, but when I came to the US from the mission field, it took adjusting to. The US is such a wonderful big country, but it only borders on 2 countries in the world and sits 2 oceans apart from all the rest. So finding common ground to communicate where one was coming from literally wasn't always easy.

As we say to new people here all the time and from our own experiences, welcome. You're not alone.