by Julie Knop

I participated in WCCN's US-Nicaragua Women's Empowerment Project [1] study tour of Nicaragua [2] in June 1999, when WCCN and Nicaragua's Network of Women Against Violence co-sponsored a conference on stress and trauma reduction techniques. About 100 women traveled from across Nicaragua to Managua in order to attend.

I am a social worker and certified traumatologist, who has most recently been working with women who are survivors of domestic and sexual violence. As a former WCCN work-study student and Board Member, and former long-time resident in Nicaragua, the study tour was a perfect opportunity to reconnect with old contacts while, in response to the most recent disaster, sharing new skills I have acquired.

It was also a unique opportunity to learn from Nicaraguan women about how they are responding to similar issues to the ones my colleagues and I dealt with daily in my previous work in a domestic violence program. I was so inspired by my time on the study tour and our encounter with the Network of Women Against Violence, and was so aware of the overwhelming need for workers in the emotional recovery of thousands if not millions of Nicaraguans, that I offered to return as a volunteer. I am now here as an ongoing part of the WCCN Women's Empowerment Project, and as follow up to the work we did during the study tour.

I arrived in Nicaragua to begin six months as a volunteer with the Network of Women Against Violence on October 4, 1999, in the middle of a "Mini-Mitch" emergency. Heavy rain had been falling for days. People were being flooded out of their homes, reconstructed bridges were being washed out and roads cut off, and many people were reliving the fears they experienced not quite one year ago when Hurricane Mitch swept through Nicaragua. Some areas not affected by Mitch were also being flooded, adding more traumatized people to the list of communities requesting training with the Network of Women Against Violence on emotional recuperation.

The meeting I had scheduled for the day after my arrival with Yamilett Mejia, the head of the Psychosocial Commission of the Network, had to be postponed as she had responded to an emergency plea for accompaniment from the Women's Center in San Rafael del Sur. Many families were dislocated from their flooded homes. They had been crowded into a school for over 5 days and were again being removed from what security they had developed.

Julie Knop demonstrates the Thought Field Therapy technique for a Hurricane survivor in Santa Maria. Santa Maria is a resettlement camp for survivors of the Posoltega mudslide. Still living in shelters made of black plastic tarps and zinc roofing, it is expected that it will be October 2000 before they are relocated to permanent homes.

As San Rafael del Sur had not been impacted directly by Hurricane Mitch, and there were no other institutions working with the people there, they turned to the Network for assistance. This community near the Pacific Ocean just south of Managua will be added to the list of places where the Network plans to train local women by the end of this year to guide their communities through the process of emotional recovery, if they can find sufficient resources to complete their goals. So far they have about $10,000 of the $23,000 they need to complete the present cycle of planned workshops, and will be looking for more funding to bring their emotional recovery training to other parts of the country as well. The new emergency has forced the postponement of some workshops, and the addition of others, but currently emotional recovery workshops are being planned or have begun in the departmental capitals of León, Chinandega, Matagalpa, Jinotega, Somoto, Ocotal, Puerto Cabezas, Bluefields, and Granada. Several other areas have already completed their training.

The Network's Psychosocial Commission formed in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, in January 1999, in order to respond to the crisis. The first group of professionals forming the commission were trained by Dr. Gilbert Brenson Lazan, a social psychologist from Bogota, Colombia, and bases its emotional recovery workshops on the process Brenson and Maria Mercedes Sarmiento D. developed in the wake of the disastrous eruption of the Arenas del Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia in 1985. The current workshop participants are all local leaders in popular organizations: a few are professionals such as psychologists, lawyers, nurses, or police officers, but most are lay organizers or "social promoters."

Each of the series of emotional recovery workshops consists of three stages. In the first two or three day workshop, participants work through their own grief and trauma, and learn techniques of self-care in order to be able to help others recuperate emotionally without further jeopardizing their own emotional health. They learn to express their emotions rather than hold them in, and learn active listening techniques as they share with each other. They are introduced to the stages of grief, and both normal and more complicated processes of healing.

In the second stage, they review their own emotional process and begin to learn the methodology for facilitating groups. In the third series they learn more technical instruments for intervention in their communities, which we first introduce as methods of self-care, such as relaxation and stress reduction techniques, body work, and other techniques such as the one I taught in the WCCN conference called Thought Field Therapy. They learn other aspects of emotional recovery group process as well.

I will accompany Yamilett and other professionals affiliated with the Psychosocial Commission as they lead workshops on emotional recovery in several different cities during my time in Nicaragua. In mid-October, I co-led the first of a three part series of grief workshops in León, and joined another team for the last day of the first part of training in Chinandega.

In addition to the group workshops, it has been found that many of the leaders who come for training have their own unresolved grief and trauma to work through, and not only from Hurricane Mitch. Also present are the memories of sometimes brutal domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse, rape, other family violence or abandonment, as well as traumatic memories of wartime losses or other recent disasters such as volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, Hurricane Joan in 1988, other floods, or even the earthquake that destroyed Managua in 1972.

The Psychosocial Commission has found that many of the women being trained also need and request individual sessions to help them in their healing process. The Commission would be happy to provide this, but in some cases does not have anyone with time available to send to places where there are not local professionals available.

Two women in Santa Maria practice the Thought Field Therapy technique during a training provided by Julie Knop.

After the workshop in Chinandega last week, it was decided to send me to do individual follow-up work with the women from the workshop who request individual counseling. As a result, I will spend at least the next month in the office of one of the Chinandega Network member organizations and in nearby towns doing individual counseling-first with the women in training and then with others as time allows. I will be using similar techniques and methodology that the Nicaraguan professionals working with the Network have been trained to use, including EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), and Thought Field Therapy, as well as other more traditional techniques.

Several areas of the Chinandega province were deeply affected by both Hurricane Mitch and the current rains, including the area around the Posoltega volcano and flooded Puerto Morazan. Cases of domestic and sexual violence, only beginning to be talked about, also seem to be endemic. Fortunately, there are some very active, committed and dynamic women working with Network affiliated organizations in Chinandega.

The people in some of the rural areas are very poor, with few resources to seek out professional help more readily available in the bigger cities. Until more Nicaraguans are trained, and they themselves are able to become free of their own traumas and grief in order to help others in their communities, I am happy to play a part in their recovery. The work of emotional recovery could hardly be more needed than it is here and now in Nicaragua, and I am very proud to join with the Network's Psychosocial Commission and WCCN's Women's Empowerment Project to be a part of this important work!

For the future, Yamilett Mejia and others of the Psychosocial Commission of the Network of Women Against Violence hope that another similar study tour can come next year to do follow up training on the same techniques begun this year, hopefully offering a full day of training this time in each technique offered, so that the participants can really feel they have learned to use the technique they choose with competence. People who were not able to attend the first conference also want the chance to attend a second one! The Network also looks forward to other ongoing interchanges with WCCN and the Women's Empowerment Project.

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Julie Knop has a long history with WCCN, including having worked as a work-study student in our Madison office and having served as a member of the board of directors. She lived in Nicaragua for six years during the 1980s and early 1990s.