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2002
Grants
Emergency Relief
Grant:
 Ibdaa
Cultural Center
Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Bethlehem, West Bank,
Palestine
Two years ago the Martín-Baró Fund gave Ibdaa
a grant to support an oral history project designed to reconnect
youth with their family and community histories. This spring, the
reoccupation by Israeli Defense Forces of Dheisheh, the refugee
camp in which Ibdaa is located, has caused the destruction of many
of the Center's facilities including the library, the hub of many
of the group's activities for young children.
  The
Fund has therefore awarded Ibdaa an emergency relief grant in the
amount of $5000 to help rebuild the library. Although not our usual
practice, the Fund's past support of Ibdaa and the extreme trauma
with which its children are grappling today warranted this exception.
In support of children's mental health, Ibdaa conducts workshops
and special events (e.g. theater, picnics, academic competitions,
cultural performances), holds after-school programs, and, in the
present moment, provides youth with the only space where they have
relative safety and the opportunity simply to play.
In
January, 2002, members of the Fund's Program Committe had the opportunity
to meet with Ziad Abbas, founder and director of Ibdaa: click
here to see our report of this discussion. |
Asociación
de la Mujer Maya Ixil: Nuevo Amanecer, Chajul, Guatemala.
After more than eight years of psychosocial and development work through
which women and children have been able to: 1) discuss the origins of
the war, 2) understand the impact of the war on mental health, 3) analyze
the condition of women in Guatemala, and 4) develop projects to meet
their psychosocial needs in Chajul, the Association of Maya Ixil Women
- New Dawn project has extended its work to rural villages surrounding
the town. Through creative workshops and organizational development
training they are accompanying women in these remote areas in the development
of material and psychosocial resources to confront the painful and longstanding
legacy of state-sponsored violence and war.
This
year's grant will enable ADMI to extend its work to the villages, and
develop popular education manuals and teaching resources that will be
used by local women in this work. Through our continuing partnership
with the group, we hope to learn more about this ongoing work and to
share that information in the United States through our educational
programming.
Asociación
Mujeres en Apoyo Para la Salud Mental Communitaria, San
Salvador, El Salvador. The Women's Association for Community
Mental Health works with women in poor and marginalized communities
contending with the effects of Salvador's long civil war, and with two
devastating earthquakes in 2001. Trained mental health workers facilitate
meetings in which women participate in group dynamics, share experiences,
and learn about basic human rights regarding healthcare, education,
employment, housing, and violence against women. Parallel meetings are
undertaken with the participants's children.
AMUSAMECO
has had particular success in developing women leaders, debunking taboos
about psychology and mental health, and incorporating young women into
their Coordinating Committee. In 2002 they will continue this work and
focus especially on establishing the independence of longer-term participants
as protagonists within their families and communities, expanding their
work among other women, and making the organization more widely known
in their communities.
 Children's
Rehabilitation Center,
Quezon City, Philippines. The Children's
Rehabilitation Center has been one of the most effective groups
working with children whose families have been dislocated by years of
military actions against supporters of autonomy for Muslims in the southern
Philippines. CRC has also responded to the needs of children facing
urban poverty and government neglect of the housing and employment needs
of the poor.
Last
year's grant aided work with children who suffered the loss of family
and friends in Payatas, the site of a huge garbage dump that collapsed.
The first two phases of mental health support for Payatas children,
emotional release and meaning construction, were completed. The 2002
grant will be used for the third and final stage, cognitive mastery,
part of which involves children becoming advocates, through the use
of theater arts and provision of direct aid, to help other children
facing similar human rights abuses.
 Fortaleza
de la Mujer Maya,
San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. Since the colonial
era, the indigenous communities of Chiapas have been isolated from the
cities and have suffered from marginalization, land seizure, racial
discrimination, lack of education, and poor health and hygiene. People
who have protested these conditions have often been persecuted, disappeared,
or assassinated, giving rise to popular movements such as the Zapatistas.
Women suffer disproportionately under these conditions and many are
forced to come to cities such as San Cristobal to survive.
Some
of these Mayan women in San Cristobal founded FOMMA with the goal of
helping others facing a similar plight. The organization provides literacy
workshops and creative means of enhancing self-esteem and teaching basic
skills. One example is the staging of theater performances, written
by participants in their own languages, that enable them to analyze
their reality and work to improve their quality of life. The Martín-Baró
Fund is providing a third year of support to FOMMA to enable them to
continue this important work and expand its reach.
 Instituto
Accion
Para el Progreso,
Huancavelica, Peru. INAPRO is a social service organization working
with Andean families who have been subjected to violence from both Sendero
(the Shining Path guerilla movement) and Peruvian military forces. Both
sides accused the people of collaborating with the other and threatened,
assassinated, and tortured them. This situation led to enormous stress
and familial violence. The children have faced both political and social
violence and suffered psychosocial trauma.
In
past years the Martín-Baró Fund supported a project focused on very
poor Andean children seeking to help them develop basic capacities such
as self-esteem, autonomy, creativity, age-appropriate humor, cultural
identity, and socialization skills. This year's grant will enable INAPRO
to continue this work, the goal of which is to create conditions that
ultimately favor the development of children's capacity to participate
responsibly as citizens in a democracy.
 K'inal
Antzetik, . Chiapas, Mexico. K'inal
Antzetik works with communities of resistance to support community-organizing,
strengthen community networks of support, and craft culturally appropriate
community strategies to deal with the psychosocial and emotional consequences
of regional violence against native people. The area in which K'inal
Antzetik is located has suffered years of state repression against indigenous
peoples, giving rise to the Zapatista uprising.
This
year's grant will be used to run mental health and human rights workshops
in a number of municipalities, and to support mental health visits in
the communities as well as meetings of health promoters. The group will
train more human rights and mental health promoters to work on issues
concerning the nature of human rights and the denunciation of human
rights violations. Mental health promoters will also learn how to take
testimonies from victims, provide psychosocial and emotional support,
and initiate legal advocacy.
Pastoral
de Solidaridad y Reconciliación,
San Marcos, Guatemala. Thirty-six years of war and state-sponsored
violence has left seemingly irreversible physical and psychosocial damage
in communities throughout Guatemala. Those who survived the torture
of family members, massacres, and displacement frequently lived under
a code of silence. The San Marcos Pastoral Project for Solidarity and
Reconciliation has participated in the Recovery of Historical Memory
Project sponsored by the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala,
a major effort to break that silence and record the genocide, torture,
rapes, kidnappings and militarization of society, and to press for justice.
The
Martín-Baró Fund grant to this organization will support workshops through
which survivors share their traumatic experiences and work together
to find ways to solve their individual and community problems in a spirit
of solidarity. It will facilitate training workshops for 40 "animators
of reconciliation" who will then offer a series of three participatory
workshops (for 30 participants in each community) focusing on: 1) the
Guatemalan Historical Context, 2) Violence - focusing on strategies
behind the violence and its effects on communities, and 3) the challenges
of repairing the social fabric.
Solidarite
des Femmes de
Fizi pour le Bien-Etre Familial, Democratic Republic of
Congo. SOFIBEF
was founded by a group of peasant women in the Fizi region of the Democratic
Republic of Congo, in response to armed tribal and regional conflict
which began four years ago. The organization is dedicated to defending
and protecting the human rights of women and children who have become
even more vulnerable since the onset of violence that has particularly
devastated the Fizi region of the Congo.
Despite
their limited resources, SOFIBEF has provided mental health services
in the form of group and individual counseling and a micro-credit program
for women, and created a newsletter in order to share information about
the ways in which people can develop and maintain coping skills when
faced with overwhelming difficulties. This work will be continued with
the support of this year's Martín-Baró Fund grant.
 Slum
Development Society, Chennai, India. The Slum
Development Society is a grassroots organization formed to address
the human rights and mental health problems of the Dalit, or undercaste,
in India. In past years the Martín-Baró Fund has supported SDS programs
designed to provide civil rights education and emotional and community
support to the Dalit of rural Tamilnadu.
This
year's grant will enable the SDS to focus on fifteen villages in its
target area and offer a range of activities - literacy education, sports
and games, play therapy, meditation, charades, street theater, music,
and human rights seminars - aimed at fostering mental health and self-esteem,
while providing information on civil and human rights.
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English
to Spanish translations
courtesy
of Melisa Flores
©
2007, Ignacio Martín-Baró Fund for Mental Health & Human Rights
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