Walking together: Healing and hope for Colombian refugees

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.