Dr. Hoskins opening class preparing artists for July project in Haiti
Today we’re focusing on preparing to work with children whose lives has been shattered by the earthquake in Haiti. Ruth Hoskins, Ph.D., a Red Cross volunteer who worked at Ground Zero after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is teaching a half-day class entitled “Psychological First Aid: Helping others in Times of Stress.”
BuildaBridge Institute participants have been joined for today’s sessions by volunteer artists we have recruited for July projects in Haiti, where they will sleep in tents while working to help children find ways to recover from what they have been through. We’ve been invited to do a pilot youth arts camp at a school, assess opportunities at an orphanage and train teachers in the BuildaBridge curriculum at a university.
Here’s a link to our Haiti blog: http://artsrelief.wordpress.com/
This class is pulling together all that we’ve studied over the last five days about the developmental stages of children, working across culture boundaries, and how the arts can be a vehicle of teaching and healing, helping children to create their own ways of dealing with the problems and traumas. Dr. Hoskins is skillfully applying that to what the artists who go to Haiti will encounter there and how they must e aware of cultural, emotional, spiritual and political realities there. She’s also teaching the importance to taking care of oneself while helping others.
The artists who go will make a difference, she said. “You are going down there as an amazing supportive presence. The people there will emember your good, heartfelt response and compassionate presence.”
As we came back from a break, pictures our co-founder, Dr. J. Nathan Corbitt has assembled showing the continuing tragedy in Haiti are being project a big screen.
Dr. Hoskins gave us intense training on natural responses to disaster, how to know when to refer to a mental health professional, maintain appropriate boundaries and compassionate body language, and how to avoid melting down ourselves.
After lunch Christine C. Wineberg, MA, MT-BC, LPC, a Philadelphia therapist, used role-playing exercises and music to help explain post-traumatic stress disorder and caring for caregivers, and responses to various types of disasters. Be prepared, she said, to “hear people express themselves differently that we do in the United States” and be sensitive to the local survival culture.
Provide familiar music in non threatening manner. Create a nonjudgmental environment that’s safe for people who don’t believe they can sing, a safe place to use their voice. And set things up that can continue for a long time, after you’ve come home, because that’s the only way to truly help the children.
She urged those who go to stay focused on the positive effects of witnessing healing, and to celebrate successes.
Know yourself, she urged, and your own history of trauma exposure and recovery. Seek support when you need it.
Make sure you are not going to a site to help yourself — be sure you’re going to be there for others. Pay attention to the children, not your own sense of what they should be doing — follow their lead.
Dr. Gene Ann Behrens, PhD, MT-BC, associate professor and coordinator of music therapy at Elizabethtown College, described her work with children in trauma in Palestine and the neurological and behavioral changes stress produces. She outlined how music therapy can help differentiate sensations and emotions, develop coping skills, focus on the present and increase resiliency.
She demonstrated with the class how to use non-traditional instruments. These instruments, she said, encourage risk-taking and exploring from different perspectives.
– Henry J. Holcomb, BuildaBridge volunteer artist on call and board member
