SAN ANTONIO, Texas (ABP) — In Matara, Sri Lanka, school teachers have moved all the classes to the upper floor because the children refuse to meet in the school's ground-level rooms. The memory of the Dec. 26 tsunami is still too fresh.
The physical destruction from the tsunami remains staggering to the eye. But the hidden emotional damage in Sri Lanka — especially to children — is probably even worse, say leaders of Baptist Child and Family Services, which is assisting tsunami victims in the island nation.
Eight months after the killer waves shattered the country, the evidence is plain if you know where to look and listen.
–In Batticaloa, a 13-year-old boy who lost his entire family and was twice swept out to sea himself. He survived by clinging to a large piece of Styrofoam “for a long time.” He draws pictures of “body parts” floating alongside crowded boats.
–In Hikkaduwa, a college student confesses to a massive guilt because he heard a friend's father calling for help but was too afraid to try to rescue him.
–In Galle, against all cultural norms, a man stands in the middle of a tent camp and weeps uncontrollably in front of visitors because he has almost no food and almost no hope.
–Also in Batticaloa, a 5-year-old girl still hasn't been told her mother drowned last December. She thinks she has “gone away on vacation.”
Because of scenes like these, Baptist Child and Family Services of San Antonio, Texas, has launched two separate-but-related projects in Sri Lanka through its international arm, Children's Emergency Relief International. The primary effort is establishing a permanent foster-care and child-protection program for the Sri Lankan government. The second is a training program to equip Sri Lankan volunteers to provide mental-health counseling to their family, friends and neighbors.
“Before the tsunami, there was not really a pressing need for a foster-care program because the extended family usually took over the care of orphaned children,” said Marla Rushing, one of two BCFS stafferers who led a nine-person counseling/training team to Sri Lanka for two weeks in July. “But the government has identified 500 orphans in just the northeast province alone. We were a little surprised when they asked us to set up this pilot program — and so were agencies like UNICEF and the Red Cross — but we are glad we are able to do this.”
After carefully drafting guidelines and procedures that combined the best of American child-care practices with the cultural realities of Sri Lanka, Children's Emergency Relief International began working with the first four foster families in early July. Currently there are 30 children in supervised care, “with about five being added every week,” Rushing said. “We already need to hire more staff.”
Sri Lankan society has a general attitude toward tragedy of “just get over it,” Rushing said, “and the concept of counseling is pretty much unknown. We were warned people wouldn't want to talk about their feelings, especially to foreigners. But we found that once a trust level was established they had lots of things to share.”
She was particularly impressed with one foster father who not only participated in the art therapy sessions designed to surface the negative emotions but was the most enthused person in the group.
“He told me that before the tsunami he had hated Christians,” Rushing said. “He wouldn't even speak to them. But since Christians were the first people to come and offer help, and since we are still here — ‘not asking anything from us, not forcing us to change our beliefs; just helping' — he had learned to appreciate Christians.”
Sri Lanka is overwhelmingly Buddhist and Hindu, “two religions that are pretty fatalistic in saying that whatever happens is either punishment or just destiny,” said Richard Brake, a staff psychologist for BCFS, a Texas Baptist agency, who participated in the trip. “Even the Muslim population holds teachings that everything is Allah's will and should be accepted. So to get them to see that it was still OK to talk about emotions is major progress.”
Three two-woman teams conducted training sessions in three coastal towns.
Brake worked with all three of the teams, as well as with the foster families, primarily using art therapy. The five-step process begins with asking participants to draw a picture of their worst experiences, followed by a detailed drawing of the event. The participants are then asked to illustrate “what part of your body hurts the worst when you think about this event,” then to draw “a safe and secure place.” The final exercise involves filling in eight sections of a piece of paper, putting the “worst event” in the first section but then listing seven good things that have happened since.
“The purpose is to acknowledge the pain of the trauma and to begin dealing with it, but then to help them see that there really is hope and that the pain isn't permanent, no matter how deep and real it is,” Brake said.
“Eight months after the fact, most of the 150 people we worked with couldn't really imagine a safe place, a good sign that they hadn't dealt with the emotions,” Brake explained. “So we had them imagine a time in the future — no matter how far out that might be — when they could be in a safe place. That seemed to work.”
The training group in the northeast province was exclusively Hindu. The three groups on the west coast were mixed Buddhist and Christian. Here the trainers were heartened that, by the end of the sessions, the two often-antagonistic groups were planning how to work together to counsel others.
Each team also reported the trainees repeatedly requested additional training.
“They were so grateful and open to learning,” Barb Cheatham, a registered nurse from Plano and a graduate student at Texas Woman's University in Denton. “I prayed every morning that God would be present in the training and prayed every night to thank him for doing just that. Realizing how all these trainees will go back to their villages and towns and neighborhoods and work with others is humbling.”