“Your Presence Is Important To Us”: Lessons In Building Trust

The women are in an uproar, yelling out the open air windows of the bright turquoise and yellow community center, shaking their hands, muttering to each other. The man, drunk and in retreat from the screams, wearing just a lungi around his narrow waist, tells them to go to the fields: It’s harvest time. It isn’t just any harvest time; it’s the first harvest this community will have since returning from years of disjointed displacement to their demolished homes and uprooted fruit trees in Meeranakadvai eight months ago.

And yet twelve women sit in plastic chairs inside the cool concrete shade of the brand new community center, their “home” as they put it. It was a meeting of the Meerankadvai Women’s Group, led by Nirosh, another of CAM’s psychosocial workers under the supervision of Stanley Prabaharan, CAM’s Psychosocial Advisor, and that – for the moment – took priority over the other many responsibilities of these mother and grandmothers. It took months of careful trust-building to get even this handful of women to meet regularly with CAM’s team; after years of violence, confusion, false promises, and hopelessness, they are wary of strangers and often live the present through the recurring nightmares of the past.

Building trust, CAM Psychosocial Coordinator Sophie Wodon emphasizes, is the key. She isn’t talking about individual counseling, although CAM’s psychosocial workers do manage dozens of individual cases at any given moment; she is talking about rebuilding an entire community whose ties were shattered during three decades of war and displacement. A son was lost, a mother is mourned, and many simply disappeared – possibly dead, maybe alive in an equally isolated resettlement village or IDP camp.

Still, there is energy coursing through in the room. The women are planning their own celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2010. The psychosocial team points to the American in the corner and emphasizes that the Women’s Day of Meeranakadvai is just as important as the Women’s Day of New York City; in this heavily patriarchal culture, especially in the remote villages where alcoholism and domestic violence are widespread, it is a novel concept to devote a whole day to celebrating women.

The celebration itself though is less important than the dynamic building between these women: They are trusting again, talking about their pain and grief, regaining their identities, finding reasons to live, developing the confidence to advocate for themselves and for their community, creating a support network. When an elderly woman with a wide, warm face, snow white hair and a deeply bent back, exclaims that she “can’t do anything” to help the celebration, the others quickly dismiss this, saying, “But your presence is important to us.” It’s a support group cum community organizing, a rarity in such a tiny village with such a pained history.

In a place where, according to CAM staff, 80% of the people have lost an immediate family member to the war, where marrying girls at the age of 14 is common, where 30% of the women are single – whether widows or simply left by their husbands – and without sources of income or sustenance, where domestic violence is ever present, the resilience of these women – at least in for a few moments in this community center - triumphs.

One woman, wearing a colorful sari, triumphantly crows, “Without women, there is no life.” And with that, they file out the door, returning to the fields.

* * *

Sitting in neat semi-circle on brightly patterned straw mats lain on the floor, the 20 young students at remote Kudumpimala Kumaran School squirm with excitement. It is the weekly workshop led by the Comité d’Aide Médicale’s (CAM) psychosocial team in this village hidden deep in eastern Sri Lanka’s paddies and plains.

The kids, skeptical and dull-eyed in the first months, have opened up to Sri and Kogulan, the psychosocial workers who visit every Wednesday with a new, creative lesson about preserving the environment and keeping their village clean. Environmental health is an important message. But the larger lessons are more subtle: Be creative, ask questions, it is ok to talk about your fears and dreams, it is ok to trust others, you can be a leader, and there can be order and stability despite the chaos of displacement. Slowly, they are taking hold. The children are acting more like the six, seven, eight and nine year olds that they are: Engaged, active, curious. Call it arts and crafts version 2.0.

It has not always been this way: These elementary school students have lived most of their lives as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) who finally returned to their ancestral villages eight months ago, after fleeing the nearby fighting between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tamil Tigers Eelam (LTTE). The villages, essentially flattened in the fighting because of their proximity to former LTTE outposts, are slowly being rebuilt, piece by piece. The school, a single large open air room with chalk boards at each end and a bright mural on the outside, is one of two permanent structures in this tiny farming community. For an eight year old in this school - looking incongruously proper in his collar and tie uniform - chaos, violence and uncertainty has been the norm for his entire life; For the school’s principal and sole teacher, war and displacement has consumed the last 25 years of their lives; consistent schooling, engaged students, and creative outlets were figments of the imagination up until a few months ago. Now, as life tentatively regains a bit of normalcy, the prospect is real.

Sri and Kolugan are joined by the village teacher as they help the students recycle collected trash by turning it into individual art projects. The students are not the only ones learning; the teacher receives coaching from the psychosocial workers on similar activities that build trust, confidence, engagement, stability and creativity. In this way, the village will have their own basic psychosocial resource for years to come and the village’s children will continue to receive the attention, support and stability that are so essential for their basic emotional and intellectual development.

The emergency NGO frenzy has already left Sri Lanka, abandoning it to the fates of the future. But walking through the village, the needs during this vulnerable transition from crisis to basic development could not scream louder. Compared to more established resettlement villages like Pirambadithivu, Kudumbimalai and its neighbor, Meeranakadvai, are each a handful of hastily constructed basic shelters - sticks, tarps, palm branches - reestablishing the villagers’ claim to the land. Here, there is an eerie absence of anyone between the ages of 10 and 20; they have all been sent to the nearby towns, where there are schools above grade five and little risk of forced recruitment as child soldiers. In a culture where children are thought of as the center of a family’s life, the legacy of disappearances generates a deeply rooted fear in parents, despite the fact that there is little risk of it now.

Back in this classroom-against-the-odds, the children focus intently on the bright paper fish they are making out of scraps of paper and old paper plates, each a bit different from the next. Holding their fish aloft for inspection, tentative but proud smiles break out on the serious faces.