The Heavy Load

Sellva’s children are beautiful – and traumatized. Mathigaran, 11, moans and twists in his chair, where his atrophied legs lay useless and slightly askew; Tharani, 7, stares, mute, at her mother as she explains: For the last four years, they have lived on the move.

It is a backbreaking load to carry: A single mother of five children under the age of 15 - three of whom are mentally and physically handicapped from the trauma of war - with no income, little security, far from her home and relatives scattered in the war-devastated North, sick with an undiagnosed illness but unable to leave her children to visit a hospital, mourning a husband in prison, living day to day on donated food, and sleeping in a dark two room hut, their meager possessions scattered here and there, piled in the seat of a dusty, broken wheelchair.

And yet, Sellva’s face creases slowly, shyly into a wide smile when she sees Malini, a Comité d’Aide Médicale psychosocial counselor. For the last two months, Malini has visited Sellva at her tiny tin and brick home twice a week. It is one of the few times that Sellva can unload the weight of her story – filled with enough pain to last 1,000 years, let alone Sellva’s 32 – to a sympathetic listener, a rarity in a community filled with trauma survivors.

Trained in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which emphasizes an individual’s control over his or her own thoughts and reactions as opposed to simply weathering external events, Malini integrates small but powerful coping exercises – meditation, relaxation and breathing – into her counseling sessions. CBT is a strategic choice: For survivors of three decades of unpredictable violence, displacement and uncertainty, exercising agency – even if only over their own minds – can be powerful. As with all of her daily home visits, Malini has worked closely with the government Mental Health Unit on Sellva’s case, bringing in a government Mobile Officer of Health for a home visit, applying for a new wheelchair at the Hospital for the Handicapped, and linking her with a livelihood project.

But mostly, Malini listens. Listens to stories about the two years that Sellva’s family of seven lived in underground bunkers – spaces that didn’t allow for normal upright movement or children’s muscular and emotional development; about how they endured combat, uncertainty and fear; about how they moved from place to place in northern Sri Lanka; about how Sellva herded her children – one in the womb, another mute and suffering seizures, a third unable to walk or communicate, the eldest two missing years of schooling – through the squalid Internally Displaced Person (IDP)camps that line the roads crisscrossing northern Sri Lanka.

She left the camps last year. But here, in this coastal village, in a hastily constructed hut on her husband’s relatives’ land far from her own home in the Vanni, Sellva’s hopelessness set in again. Still, she lives on, day by day. When Malini first met Sellva, on a referral from another counseling client, the young mother was deeply depressed and overwhelmed. Though she is still mired in her family’s trauma, destitution and disabilities, she knows she is not forgotten. She is heard, she is seen, she endures. Her struggle is validated.

Sellva’s future may be unclear, but this she knows: Next week Malini will come.