"They are normal children in abnormal situations"More than 2 months after the May 12 earthquake, more people in the affected areas are being relocated to temporary shelters and getting relief supplies, yet the healing of their emotional pains has just started. On a bright, sunny afternoon at UNICEF headquarters in Beijing, Ms. Kirsten Di Martino, UNICEF China Child Rights Chief, shares with us what UNICEF is doing to help children and their families step out of the earthquake's shadow. Many people think that in an emergency like an earthquake, the priority is to provide people with food and shelter. The common belief is that the emotional needs are not so important. Kirsten: Many of the people who survived the earthquake may have lost their families, or witnessed the deaths of other people. This is a huge natural disaster. They are still in shock. So, we should not only care about their physical needs but also pay attention to their emotional needs. In fact, children are very resilient. About 90% to 95% of children recover naturally, while about 5% to 10% may need individual or more specialized care and support. This percentage may seem to be very low, but if you multiply it with the whole population affected by the quake, there is a huge need for emotional support. Even many months after the earthquake, survivors may feel lonely, depressed, or angry, Some will suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. We are now very concerned about certain vulnerable groups like children, parents who lost their children, the injured, the disabled and the elderly. How can we identify the traumatized children and how should they be dealt with? We need to be very sensitive, right? Kirsten: They are not abnormal children in normal situations. They are normal children in abnormal situations. Their schools collapsed, their peers or families died, they are now living in tents which are crowded and not hygienic. Their lives have undergone such dramatic changes. Some children may become withdrawn, anxious, scared, or even aggressive. What we should do is to let them express their feelings, and not ask them to deny their emotions like telling them to stop crying or hide their anger.Some children may feel guilty because they managed to run out of the schools before they collapsed while some of their peers may not have been so lucky, while some did heroic things like saving students from the rubble, others did not and they may feel bad. We must be careful not to make them feel guilty. What we have to do is to build trust with them and make them feel safe by moving them to a safe place away from the site of the trauma. If they want to talk about their experience, listen to them. They shouldn't be forceed to speak, or repeatedly asked to recall their experiences. The duplication of psychological interventions can also cause further trauma to children. Since the earthquake, there have been lots of volunteers and psychologists arriving in Sichuan, either organized in groups or just on their own initiative, to try to take care of children. In most cases they can't stay for a very long time. The may stay there for a few days and then leave, sort of like migrating. Also, at this stage, the children in the quake zone are attracting lots of attention. Many outsiders come to visit them. But as time goes by, the attention may dwindle. Kirsten: Yes. That's why UNICEF has taken an approach to empower the local community, instead of bringing in volunteers, to help in the long-term recovery. The affected children need a safe and clean place where they are protected from abuse, neglect, and danger, and where they can recover fully. This place is what we call a 'Child Friendly Space'. It can be short-term and set up in camps and temporary shelters, or long-term and located in communities. The Child Friendly Space is a place where children can attend group activities like playing games, singing, dancing, painting, etc. It will help them to bond with each other, to feel that they are safe and not alone. These activities can also help the trained workers to identify those children showing initial signs of more serious trauma and provide specific individual support to them. We are also providing life skills training to children to help them learn how to deal with the risks they may face, like how to protect themselves from abuse, violence, exploitation or trafficking. UNICEF is now working with the Government of China to set up 30 such centers in the most affected communities. You mentioned a word 'Psycho-social support', what does it mean? Kirsten: It's a combination of psychological service and social service. It means that all the people in the community shall be involved in the psychosocial recovery of children and support their emotional well-being. The support should be holistic because the children are part of the families and communities. For example, many teachers and parents are also traumatized. They also need emotional support. If the parents are not happy, children won't be happy.There are two key principles of the Child Friendly Space, namely, integration and participation. We establish the centers together with local people in their communities. Each of the Child Friendly Space will have core staff-members, a manager, a pre-school/daycare worker, a mentor for older children, and a psychosocial specialist. UNICEF provides training not only to the staff but also the community volunteers who will help better address the needs of children. In this way, our centers can also be the focal point of the community. Parents take their children to the center. They can chat with other parents. It gives them the feeling that their lives are returning to normal. This helps them to build their own capacity of recovery. Do Child Friendly Spaces really work? Kirsten: According to a UNICEF-trained community volunteer who offered psychosocial therapy in 2005 to the tsunami-affected children of Sri Lanka, "At first the children would draw pictures of the tsunami, but now we are finally seeing happy pictures which we never saw when we started out, like pictures of birds, trees, waterfalls, rivers, and play. The ocean itself seems to have returned to its usual calmness, perhaps a sign that children are getting back on track." Experts have noticed that children start to laugh and show more optimism after attending psychosocial workshops. UNICEF launched its first Child-Friendly Spaces in 1999 after the Kosovo crisis. Since then, the value of this intervention has been widely recognized and has become a standard response to natural disasters and armed conflicts. Many teachers went through the tragedy with their students. Some of them also lost their families. Is there anything we can do to help them? Kirsten: In rural areas, many students live in boarding schools. When the earthquake struck, the teachers experienced the disaster with their students. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, they were not only teachers but also caregivers. But they also need to take care of themselves and their own families. As we observed in the field, many teachers are living in difficult situations. Teachers also need time to recover and heal from this traumatic experience.How long do you think it will take for the affected people to recover? Kirsten: The degree of their trauma varies. As I said before, people are very resilient and most will recover in time just by returning to a normal life and being surrounded by their friends and relatives. But for some, the recovery may take longer and sometimes the post-earthquake reaction is delayed. UNICEF is committed to offer long-term psychosocial support to these people.
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