That definitely sounds like a God thing. Now, tell us a little bit about your very interesting day job that sort of colored the characters in your book.  I was just doing a little bit of research, and I was trying to wrap my arms around what that looked like. 

My full-time day job at the moment is working at Headington Institute. We’re a nonprofit that provides psychological and spiritual support for humanitarian workers around that world. I direct our training program. Basically what that means is that when I’m on the road, I’m teaching workshops on stress, trauma and thriving and coping with the pressures of humanitarian and disaster-relief work. I talk about travel stress and a whole bunch of other unusual stresses that tend to come with humanitarian work. When I’m back here in California [McKay’s home base], I’m writing material for their website and overseeing projects and planning for workshops. We’re working on regional workshops in Kenya.  Unfortunately I had to postpone going to Kenya next week due to the violence there at the moment, but we’re hoping to be there in July, and then in Asia sometime in August.  So, it keeps me busy. 

Do you ever have to use some of your own advice just to deal with what your characters went through when you were writing it? 

Yeah, I think writing Hands was actually somewhat therapeutic for me. I had almost a complete first draft before I started working at Headington. A lot of the stuff I had done before Headington fed into it as well. I had done a Master’s degree in International Peace Studies. And one of the major questions is “How do you begin to wrap your mind around societies that have hurt each other so badly—even recently?” So a lot of my early trauma experience in terms of psychology, in terms of being, was while working as a psychologist in Australia. I don’t actually work as a registered psychologist here in California, but I did in Australia. And that was in prisons and with the police, so I picked up a lot of trauma experience there that made me think about what happens to us when we come up against the worst that life has to offer.

I think a lot of my early struggles, even from being a little girl, when I was 7 ... we moved to Bangladesh. And I think that transition from a wealthy, developing world to a not wealthy, developing world, (at that time I think Bangladesh was the second poorest country in the world) was so difficult to wrap your mind around. I think I had a lot of very deep questions about suffering and God’s role in that and our role and response. Basically, how do you reconcile omnipotence and goodness, and how on earth can you make sense of these things when you come up against them that closely? 

So I think, when I started writing the book, I was writing fictionally about some of my own deepest struggles with those issues.  I think I chose to pursue it in my 20s because it was the thing I was grappling with most deeply. I thought, This scares me to write about this, really scares me.” It was personally really challenging, but I think the trauma work helped me really think through various different people’s types of reactions to these events, and having them try to deal with those questions of suffering.