Less Fearful, More Active: Foreword
Students at Halidere Primary School, Kocaeli, exhibit a group drawing of their ideal village. Photograph by Yakut Temiroğlu-Sundur © UNICEF Turkey 2000
Between August and November, 1999, the industrial northwestern Marmara region of Turkey was devastated by two massive earthquakes. Eighteen thousand died, many thousands more were injured and over six hundred thousand were made homeless as a direct result of the two catastrophes. The cost of the damage to the infrastructure has been estimated at $1.5billion. But the true cost of the disasters will never be fully accounted for in any currency: over a quarter of a million children and their families continue to cope, daily, with the traumatic after effects of bereavement, physical injury, near-death experiences, homelessness, dispossession and memories of the profoundly disturbing sights and sounds they witnessed during the earthquakes.
As part of it’s response to the needs of these children, their families and teachers, MONE initiated the Psycho-social School Project in collaboration with UNICEF and with technical and professional support from the Centre for Crisis Psychology in Bergen, Norway. The aims of the project were to reintroduce a sense of normality in the children’s lives as quickly as possible, to alleviate stress responses and to prevent any further increase in the incidence of such responses. This was to be achieved primarily within the classroom setting, through the medium of the teachers. Consequently the first step involved the process of debriefing those teachers, most of whom were survivors themselves.
As such, the Psycho-social School Project was broad in scope because of the vast number of people it sought to reach, and Turkey has never before witnessed such a wide-ranging collaboration between communities, the helping professions, academics and the government at local, national and international levels. In order to implement the Psycho-social School Project many technical and organisational problems were overcome as well as those inevitable questions of a more intricately emotional nature. Nevertheless, the project proved to be successful in its objectives with many expected and, happily, unexpected results. It is hoped that the lessons learned from this unprecedentedly ambitious intervention will serve not only Turkey but that they will prove to be of benefit in global terms following any catastrophe, either natural or man-made, which may occur in the future.
This is an account of that response.
The fully illustrated text of Less Fearful, More Active is also available for download in print-ready pdf format. [PDF 1.25MB]
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