A BRIEF MENTAL EXERCISE AND

DIALOG ON SOCIAL WORK

By: Imran Ahmad Sajid

Tuesday March 1, 2011

1. Mental Exercise on Social Work

It was a moonlit night. The wind was blowing nicely. The leaves and
branches of the trees were making sweet noise. I was sitting on the roof
top of my house reading my Social Work book. Suddenly I saw a light spot
coming down from the sky. The light spot was moving straight towards me
and it was getting brighter and brighter. Then about 20 meters above my
head, it stopped moving further down. It was a spaceship. Suddenly, the
door opened and an odd creature came down from the spaceship. It
landed near me and said, “Hi, I am Zelda from planet Neptune.”, “Hi”, I
said panicly, “what are you doing here on earth?” “I came on earth to
enquire about something”, said Zelda. I asked, “what is it Mr. Zelda?”
Zelda said, “Well, I know nothing about planet earth and the creatures
living on this planet. However, I heard that there is something on this
planet which is called SOCIAL WORK. What is it? What is social work?”

2. What is Social Work

I said, “Well, Zelda, social work is not any physical object. You can not
touch it. You can only perceive it.”

“Will you mind making it easy for me Mr. Imran”, said Zelda.

“What will you do when you know it?” I said.

“I am just curious about it.” Said Zelda.

“Ok then, listen carefully. The people on this planet are social being and
they are gregarious. I mean that they are by nature made to live in a
group life. They live together. When the people of this planet live together,
they have different kinds of relationships with each others. Sometimes,
there is very close relationship between two or more people which you
may call primary relationship. While other times, the relationship is not
that much close—call it secondary. And yes, sometimes, there is
antagonistic relationship between people.

Then, what happens, there comes a difficult time in the lives of the people
who are in close relationship with each other. There comes some sort of
imbalance in their relationship. One of the persons may become sick,
mentally or physically, and the other is affected by his/her sickness. And
sometimes, they want to live together but some sort of ambiguities and
 lack of communication and other factors make the relationships strain.
When this happens, the normal routine of the people, individually or in
group, is disturbed.”

At this point, Mr. Zelda from planet Neptune interpreted my speech and
asked, “Does this mean that this is their normal close relationships which
make the people of this planet to work in a normal routine?”

“Well, it seems a YES to me”, I said.

3. What do Social Workers Do?

So, when this normal routine is disturbed due to imbalance in the
relationships of people, they try to solve it. First, the people sort out their
own solutions—and this goes automatically. When the people fail to find
the solution themselves, then there are people on this planet who are
called SOCIAL WORKERS who solve this problem of relationships among
people—both close relationships and secondary as well. So, this is called
SOCIAL WORK on this planet—solving the problems of human
relationships. Keep it in mind Zelda that these relationships are not just
limited to people individually, but collectively as well.”

4. How Social Workers Work?

Again, Mr. Zelda asked, “how do these SOCIAL WORKERS solve those
relationship problems?”

I replied to Zelda, “Aah, they probably have much better understanding of

how our relationships (close and secondary) work and they have some sort
of techniques to probe into our problems and sort out there solutions.”
They may ask the questions from each person / party individually or may
ask both the persons / parties to sit together and talk to him. “

“Oh, these Social Workers must be good guys then? Said Zelda. They are
doing amazing things. These human beings interest me more now. Now I
am going back to planet Neptune. I will come again and ask you more
about people of this planet. Thanks for your information Imran.”

“You are welcome”, I replied. With this a light tube appeared from the
spaceship and Zelda flew in the air towards the spaceship. And within
seconds, the spaceship disappeared in the sky.

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Imran Ahmad Sajid is a Ph.D. Research Scholar at the University of Peshawar. He

can be reached at imranahmad131@gmail.com