Walking together: Healing and hope for Colombian refugees

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Promoting Restoration from Refugee Trauma UNDERSTANDING REFUGEE TRAUMA As victims of war, torture and human rights abuses, Colombian refugees have often experienced considerable trauma. Just as trauma effects a person’s mental and emotional well being, trauma can and does affect how refugees interact with and adapt to their receiving community. At the same time, Colombian refugees are people of great resilience, strength and courage and have potential not only to recover from the effects of their past experiences but to grow in new and meaningful ways. When considering refugee trauma, it is useful to begin by differentiating the following three concepts: stress, trauma and resilience. 17 The word stress is used to refer to any outside force or event that has an effect on the body, mind or emotions. We also use the word stress to refer to the automatic physical, mental or emotional response to these events. Stress - both the event and the reaction - is a normal part of life and can be neutral, positive or negative. A healthy level of stress encourages productivity and creativity and leads to a sense of well-being and satisfaction. Too much stress is overwhelming, causing frustration and distress. Stress that builds up over time is known as accumulated or compounded stress, and can cause general anxiety, depression and even burnout. Colombian refugees share their experiences dealing with the effects of trauma after arriving in Canada: “Here you really keep your memories to yourself. At times it seems as though you have lost your memory. Sometimes I don’t think about those memories for many days. Other days the memories come back to you and it’s like living them all over again. The “memory loss” doesn’t last very long - but those moments (when you are not thinking about your past) - are really cool. You feel good when you are not thinking about the memories of what you have lived.” - Sara “Sometimes it’s difficult because it is still...sometimes it seems like it was just yesterday. I still don’t know how to cure that. Every so often I feel nostalgic, it hits me hard and causes me stress.” - D o r a 17. Definitions of stress, trauma and resilience adapted from the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) Program, Eastern Mennonite University, Virginia, USA. www.emu.edu/star
56 w a l k i n g t o g e t h e r “The memories of family members that you left behind are difficult. You hope that you can visit them one day. You wish you could vaccinate the perpetrators of the violence, so that they would stop doing such stupid things.” - Carlos “When we first came here it was really hard for us when people asked us where we lived, how many children we had, where we came from, why we came. We had trained ourselves and our children never to give out that kind of information. We were always on the defence. It was the same with pictures - we didn’t want anyone to take our pictures. We were worried when our children’s pictures showed up on the school walls, we didn’t want their pictures to appear in the newspaper. At first we always said ‘no, no, no, no, no, no.’ We were trying to protect ourselves, but later we realized that we had to change. That it is ok, even nice, to talk about ourselves. We had to adapt. These are things that take time to get over. You never stop being alert. Here people are more trusting. This is a good place for us - it is peaceful, we can go outside for walks.” - Nidia Like stress, trauma can be used to refer both to an event and to the response that survivors have to the event. Traumatic events are highly stressful, horrifying events over which people feel that they have no control and in which they feel powerless and threatened by injury or death to themselves or someone else. Some of the traumatic events that refugees experience can be found on the chart Triple Trauma Paradigm in the section Characteristics of the Refugee Journey. Traumatic events can be classified into different categories: entire group of people. or ethnocide. unjust systems, poverty, racism and other forms of discrimination.
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Walking together: Healing and hope for Colombian refugees

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