TWI
for the Children, Inc.
Trauma Training Workshop
(Dr. Roland
Reed)
July 1999
This
page provides Dr. Roland Reed's reflections on his work with teenaged
children at the orphanage in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of
the "Coping with Trauma" project of TWI for the Children, Inc.
“Two
ten-year olds, Ines and Dalila, began following us around and stood on the
periphery of the teen’s activities throughout the day.
By the final day, they had slipped into the older group and were
full participants. I sketched
their portraits, promised to write, and Dalila, who speaks English taught
Ines to say, "You are my friend, Roland."
I knew then I have to go back.”
Dr.
Roland Reed, July 1999
Sarajevo
: June 1999
(Friday)
Arrived
at the French S-4 guarded Sarajevo Airport, yesterday and was driven past scores
of shelled and burned public buildings and private homes to my temporary home, a
three story building with 18 apartments, high on one of the hills surrounding
the city center. The roof, like
that of most of the other buildings on Antuna Hangija Street, is patched with a
red plastic sheet covering a large hole caused by a mortar shell in 1995.
Everywhere are reminders of the four years during which Serbian gunners
terrorized Sarajevo citizens with canons, mortars and snipers placed on the
mountain tops all around the city.
26
June 1999
(Saturday)
Got
up this morning and ate a splendid breakfast of fresh-squeezed apricot juice, a
home-made cherry tart, a bowl of fruit, eggs and sausage, and a cup of strong,
wonderful Bosna kaffe. My landlady,
a war widow whose apartment I shared, Madame Mira Ilich, knows no English except
"OK" and "bye-bye," is a famous cook in this neighborhood.
Met
the rest of the Trauma Training Workshop team with the TWI For the Children,
non-profit organization, along with the team were translators Azra and Vjeko
Saje (on loan to us from Mercy Corps), and teen-age translators, Amina and Keko,
and our driver, Vahid. Rode in a VW
van to Zenica, about an hour and twenty minutes north and west of Sarajevo,
through mountain passes, fields of hay being harvested by farmers, men and women
with long scythes and wooden pitchforks. It
was a journey of contrasts: high-powered
European cars on the highway, old men and women in fields guarding one milk cow
each, or three or four sheep, tractors, some the size of small riding lawn
mowers, pulling hay carts on the highway, yellow tape marking areas not yet
cleared of land-mines, and everywhere, homes, stables and barns blasted and
gutted by canon and mortar fire.
26-28 June 1999
At
Zenica’s Dom I Porodica (Home and Family Orphanage), we were greeted by the
director, Zenica’s mayor and the Minister of Education from the Zenica Canton,
and of course by the children. The
age range in this orphanage is from 10 months to 22 years.
One of them is on duty as a soldier guarding the Old Town district in
Sarajevo during the week, returning to Dom I Porodica and his "family"
on week-ends. He has lived here
since he was a toddler.
Each
day is spent working alternatively with twenty teen-agers and with orphanage
directors and care-givers from nine
other orphanages from various cities and towns in Bosna, and the SOS Kinderhof
from Sarajevo. The other Trauma
Team members focused on the adults, dealing with anger management, conflict
resolution concepts and the importance of
the consistent application and enforcement of rules.
I followed up conceptual sessions with improvisations and exercises
designed to identify sources of anger, promote cooperative problem solving and
reverse role playing to develop a sense of an antagonist’s perspective.
Anastasia Samaras and I had developed many of these ideas and techniques
in our Spring 1999 course at Catholic University.
Between the sessions with care-givers, I worked in similar ways with the
teen-agers. My young translators were immensely valuable, not only as conveyers
of my words, but as peers with whom the young orphans quickly identified, and
thereby helped to break down a natural distrust of foreigners bearing gifts. 
(By
the end of the three-day intensive seminar, even the most initially dubious
adults and teen-agers were participating whole-heartedly in the exercises.)
The
combination of anger, affection, hostility, caring, depression and exuberance
that was constantly exhibited by the group both moved me and exhausted me.
Group
discussions and improvisations dealing with anger and grievances frequently led
to the edge of chaos and back to quiet reflection and considered responses.
(By the third day, the work and play while still moderately unruly, had
become wholly good natured and mostly cooperative. "Please come back!"
was the most frequently translated response at the end of the last session,
following a puppet dance to loud hip-hop music with scarf marionettes I had
taught them to make, as Jane Henson
had taught me at Catholic University.)
