Dr. Robin Gurwitch trains caregivers to help Sichuan's children heal from disaster
“What’s your favorite color?”
“Yellow,” answers the 11-year-old girl calmly sipping a yogurt snack in a classroom at her “tent school” in Dujiangyan, Sichuan.
“Yellow,” agrees her 10-year-old friend, her hair braided into ponytail knots and held in place by giant, blue, Mickey Mouse-shaped hair ties.
“What’s a color you don’t like?”
“I don’t like grey,” offers the younger girl while her friend nods.
“Sometimes children who have been through earthquakes get scared and sometimes they like to learn ways to help them become calm. Your body can’t be scared on the inside and calm at the same time. We can use the colors to help you feel calm. Would you like to learn a way to use yellow and grey to help you stay calm?”
Both girls nod.
“I want you to think about yellow and breathe in deep yellow. Let’s breathe yellow in together. Breathe in the yellow. In comes all of the calm, in comes all of the relaxing feelings. Breathe. Breathe. Now breathe out the grey. Slowly, slowly breathe out the scared feelings, breathe out the grey, breathe out the worry.”
The girls, breathing deeply in and out look at each other and smile.
Psychologist Robin Gurwitch, Program Coordinator at the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement and Professor at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center has offered such simple yet powerful techniques to children who have experienced natural and man-made disasters like the Oklahoma City bombing, the collapse of the towers on 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina, and now she has come to China to help train Half the Sky’s field staff and other volunteers to provide “psychological first aid” in the wake of the massive earthquake in Sichuan. She did not come to China, says Gurwitch, to help children “get over” the earthquake. “You cannot get over the death of loved ones. You help children become resilient, you help children cope with this and whatever comes next and you help them grow and continue to move forward.”
Much of the work of childhood trauma specialists like Gurwitch is to gently but firmly take on the myths prevalent among the children’s adult caretakers in the wake of disasters. Two of the most common myths are that if children talk about what they went through it will make them feel worse, and stoicism (“Stop being scared. It’s time to put this behind you.”) will make them feel better. One child told a Half the Sky Field Supervisor that her teacher tells the class to be strong because they’re in sixth grade and they are role models—if they cry the younger children will start crying. But Gurwitch says that the children’s caretakers should instead support the children: “It is important to give the message that it’s okay to be scared. Big people get scared too. And one way of being a role model for little children is to show them that big kids cry too and then move forward with their lives.”
Though Gurwitch has worked with children in the aftermath of many traumatic events, she says she has been struck by the magnitude of the disaster in Sichuan in which 17,000 children died in an instant And she has also been struck by the “mindboggling” enormity and importance of the Sichuan Caregiver Training Project that Half the Sky, in partnership with the Ministry of Civil Affairs and National Center for School Crisis & Bereavement has taken on and how quickly the work started: “There is lots of evidence that early intervention leads to better outcomes.”
Equally important to starting early, says Gurwitch, is the fact that the Project is a long-term one--everyone working on it knows they are in it for the long haul, a welcome departure from many post-disaster efforts. Says Gurwitch, “After every disaster there is an influx of people, celebrities, rescue workers, and the media who disappear, on to the next story or the next disaster.” But, says Gurwitch, “The earthquake will be on the back page long before the need goes away. The best care is long-term care.”
Gurwitch also believes that training Chinese volunteers is the best way to provide quality care. At the Project’s first workshop at the Chengdu Children’s Welfare Institution this week, Gurwitch provided valuable training for Half the Sky’s field supervisors and volunteers of varied backgrounds, but she realizes that in the field, working with the children, her work is constrained because she does not speak Chinese. Gurwitch thinks it is more important to train Chinese-speaking volunteers with varied backgrounds than it is to provide more PhDs who need translators: “You do not have to be a psychologist to make a difference and I think there is a need to be able to communicate easily and to understand the culture of the children.”
In addition to providing training this week, Gurwitch also helped Half the Sky’s staff compile a list of supplies for the enormous white tents (Two are up already and 12 are planned.) where volunteers will work with the children. In addition to the toys, books, music, and art supplies that Half the Sky uses at all of its centers, Gurwitch recommended toys relevant to the children who survived the earthquake because children need materials to work out the unspeakable horror they have experienced. Long after some adults thought that is was time for the children to move past 9/11, young children were still constructing tall buildings with blocks and using toy airplanes to knock them down. “When will they stop?” asked one caretaker. Says Gurwitch: “The children stop when they learn new ways to tell their stories.”
For Half the Sky’s tents Gurwitch recommended toy families, a mom, a dad, and children, because children overwhelmed by the grief of losing one or two parents in an earthquake may use the toys to bury the toy moms and dads. Other children who can’t bear to bury toy moms and dads may bury a mama tiger or a papa tiger or a mama bear and a papa bear so Gurwitch also recommended buying small, plastic toy animal families. Finally, she recommended buying toys that reflect the positive side of every disaster—the people who come to help—soldiers, rescue workers, doctors and nurses. And lots of bulldozers, cranes and trucks first used to look for survivors, but now being used for the enormous rebuilding effort.
Before she left the two girls in Dujiangyan, Gurwitch, impressed by how eager they were to breathe deeply, told them that they could use the yellow-grey color breathing now and in the future when they might need it for different feelings. She asked the girls if they could make a promise to do the breathing whenever they needed it and also to practice it every day. “Do we have a deal?” The girls smiled and in the universal language of childhood offered their fingers up for a pinky swear—two small girls swearing to take care of themselves as they learn to make their way in a world that will never be the same.