Smiles Are Contagious

They dance with abandon. The girls and the boys – once reserved – are gleeful, bouncing to the South Indian beat.

The children rushing through the front gate, gossiping in corners, stepping slowly in walking meditation, are far more engaged and outgoing than those from the remote resettlement villages. Many of these glowing children are poor and all survived the Tsunami, the internal conflict in their village, some only just arrived with their resettled families, but their lives – with help from the Comite d’Aide Medicale Community Center – are infinitely more stable than the children just a few hours away in the recently resettled village of Kudumbimalai.

The soft green building of offices, counseling rooms, a computer room, a tutoring room and a playroom faces a bright blue open-air auditorium, with a stage perfect for the cultural events – dance, music, plays –featured there regularly. In the mornings, the Center is peaceful and private, with men and women filtering in for counseling sessions and psychosocial workers setting off on home visits; in the afternoons, minutes after the school days ends, the Center hums with the youthful energy of 80 children.

Even in the U.S., this would be more than your average Community Center. But in a poor community still reeling from waves (literal and figurative) of trauma, this place is a minor miracle. This is a Community Center with deep roots in the community; a Center that opened its doors in 2007, when violence was an everyday reality; a Center whose sandy grounds were once strewn with the bodies of Tsunami victims; a Center which provides individual and group counseling, clinical referrals to psychiatrists, meditation, tutoring, therapeutic arts and a safe space for a community traumatized by decades of war and disaster; a Center which will remain in the community’s hands as the Comite d’Aide Medicale transitions it to a Sri Lankan NGO, Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies (CHA), a model of careful planning and sustainability.

Precious as the Center may be, its staff deals with the most basic of human struggles: alcoholism, domestic violence, depression, anxiety, poverty, single mothers and widows struggling in a patriarchal culture, grief, traumatic stress, desperation, hopelessness, suicide, disability, the hidden painful pasts that blaze, life-like, in people’s everyday lives. Working closely with government health officers, psychiatric units, and handicapped services, the team of five carefully listens to, refers, encourages, and, in some small ways, helps heal their clients.

You can pick out the new ones. They are hesitant. Quiet. Slightly removed from the others. The smiles come slowly, almost catching the child by surprise when they finally spill out and crack that protective mask. Valentine, the Center’s Program Manager, grins knowingly: The dancers started out that way too. It did not last long. The joy is contagious. Before you know it, it catches you.