The Birth of Family Therapists: The Kosova Systemic Family Therapy Training Program

The purposes of this article are to describe a program of training a pioneering group of family therapists in a developing country delivered by trainers from abroad, and discuss the benefits of such a project and the difficulties it encounters. The four-year Kosova Systemic Family Therapy Training Program is in the first half of its third year when these lines are being written. It is sponsored by the Kosova Health Foundation and carried out by an International Family Therapy Association-affiliated team of traveling trainers who come to Kosovo from various parts of the world. The trainers vary considerably in personality and theoretical orientations. The training includes five main components: An overview of the field, its history and its diverse theoretical orientations and approaches to practice, a wide scale systematic integration, skills development, personal development, and supervised practice. The training is conducted by short, in loco, direct-contact modules and by distance learning and supervision. Kosovo, formerly an semi-independent region in the south of Serbia and a part of Yugoslavia, populated mainly by Muslim Albanians, declared its independence in 2008, ten years after the culmination of a bitter war. Kosovo is now struggling with the after-effect of the war and with rapid social, demographic, and cultural changes running fast ahead of its political and economical development. The effects of all these changes on the functioning of families are dramatic. The goals of the training program are to train a first generation of family therapists who will hopefully serve the affected community and eventually prepare the next generation. So far, this has proved a rewarding, but by no means easy, task.