June 1, 2019 – In April, specially-trained staff from the Whitaker Peace & Development Initiative (WPDI) conducted 12 trauma healing sessions at our Community Learning Center in the Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement. The sessions were attended by a total of 225 community members – including women and children – and focused on topics including the impact of trauma on peacebuilding, handling community-wide trauma, and strengthening community referrals to WPDI’s Trauma Healing Officer.
The Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement was originally established in 1990 and re-opened in 2014 during the civil war in South Sudan due to the influx of South Sudanese refugees into Uganda. It now hosts almost 60,000 refugees, most of which are from South Sudan. Many residents have experienced hardship, violence, and other horrendous things, resulting in post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological issues. If left untreated, the effects of these can reverberate throughout the settlement community, ensuring cycles of endless violence and grief.
WPDI’s trauma-healing sessions seek to help patients recover from past wounds and reach inner peace and are a first step towards regaining the capacity for resilience. We use Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET), a culturally sensitive approach that allows a person to tell himself or herself about their life influences and how the person perceives their experiences and well-being in a holistic way. This way, a patient can establish a chronological narrative of his or her life, concentrating mainly on traumatic experiences but also incorporating positive events; simply, the memory of a traumatic event is refined and understood in a more thorough fashion.
The trauma healing sessions have been very popular within the settlement. Additionally, they have helped community members come together and support one another – something at the heart of our philosophy. As Aida, a member of a local women’s group testified “In the beginning, my group had a lot of conflicts. But after attending trauma healing sessions at the Community Learning Center, we were able to start counseling one another by sharing our experiences. This has resulted in our group becoming much closer.” Joshua had a similar experience, telling us that the sessions have helped him “realize that most people living within the settlement are traumatized in one way or another” and that, in his case, they have helped “restore my lost hope.”
In the coming months, WPDI staff will continue to conduct trauma healing sessions at the Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement. Although the need for such sessions is immense, we know we will continue to help hundreds of people regain the capacity for resilience and live happy, healthy lives once again.