|
|
|
|
2004
Grants
Members
of the MBF Program Committee meet with representatives of the
Burmese Refugee Project, a 2004 grant recipient.
|
 |
 Asociación
Centro de Educación y Formación Maya Ixil, San Gaspar
de Chajul, Guatemala. The Association of the Center for Mayan Ixil
Education and Development works with youth and women in the rural town
of Chajul and its surrounding villages. Chajul is an area deeply affected
by more than thirty-six years of civil war and ongoing and entrenched
poverty. Prior to its formation, many members of ACEFOMI worked within
the town to meet the multiple psychosocial needs of women and children
who survived the war and its effects. With funds from the Martín-Baró
Fund, ACEFOMI will extend their previous work to include youth and adult
women in five rural communities: the villages of Ju'il, Tchacalte',
Vi'pech, Ixla' and Visiquitchun. Thirty young girls and women in each
community will participate in workshops on women's and indigenous rights
and on community mental health. The goals of the training are to create
a group-based process for remembering the past, enhancing women's self-esteem
and, through participatory and popular education techniques, provide
resources through which girls and women can organize their communities
toward creating a more just future.
 Boarding
School Healing Project,
South Dakota, Arizona & New Mexico, USA. During the 19th
and well into the 20th century, Native American children were forcibly
abducted from their homes to attend boarding schools, where they were
systematically humiliated, abused, and stripped of their language, cultural
traditions, and family connections. Native children were taught to be
ashamed of their identity and themselves, and the devastating impact
of these experiences continues to affect tribal life today.
 The
Boarding School Healing Project is a national coalition of organizations
working with Native communities. It seeks to document and raise consciousness
about these abuses so that these communities can begin a process of
healing, and demand accountability and justice.
Current pilot programs are working with the Lakota nation in South Dakota,
and with the Navajo nation in Arizona and New Mexico. Members of these
tribal communities are being trained to gather documentation using participatory
action research, which can include talking circles, interviews, and
focus groups. The BSHP is mobilizing a variety of resources in this
effort, including mental health professionals, support groups, and traditional
healing circles.
A
2004-5 grant from the Martín-Baró Fund will help support the costs of
travel connected with documentation and training, food and supplies
for tribal support groups, creation of a crisis hotline for survivors,
and planning for a Boarding School Day of Remembrance.
 Burmese
Refugee Project, Thailand. The Burmese Refugee project
is working in northwestern Thailand with approximately one hundred ethnically
Shan refugees from Myanmar (formerly Burma), helping them to gain access
to education, health care, and legal services. These services are essential
to the refugees' quality of life and human rights, and are otherwise
denied to them by the Burmese and Thai governments. This project
is profiled in the Spring,
2004, issue of our newsletter.
Centro
Bartolomé de las Casas, San Salvador, El Salvador. The
Centro Bartolomé de las Casas is a community organization with five
staff and many volunteers who work with local communities in economic,
social, psychosocial and spiritual development. With funds from the
Martín-Baró Fund, two members of their staff and several volunteers
will extend recently initiated psychosocial work with women survivors
of massacres and families of victims in two rural Salvadoran communities,
Arcatao and Perquin. They will train local community workers who will
work with an organization of survivors in these communities to systematically
address social trauma through a project of recovering memories and through
individual and group-based work using creative play, traditional medicines,
and acupressure. This psychosocial work is part of a wider community
process through which survivors will work to vindicate the past and
seek justice towards the future.
 Christians
for Peace in El Salvador, El Salvador. With support
from the Martín-Baro Fund, CRISPAZ is working with a prisoner support
group known as OPERA, for the Spanish initials that stand for Optimism,
Peace, Hope, Renewal and Harmony. The group works with young inmates,
mostly gang members, in two prisons in El Salvador. High crime rates
and the growth of gangs in El Salvador can be traced in part to the
unhealed wounds of El Salvador's civil war, and to current economic
policies, prompted by the U.S., that exacerbate economic inequality.
 While
the inmates involved in OPERA have contributed to the social violence
that plagues El Salvador, they have also been victimized by it. Many
have been the victims of violence at home and on the streets. OPERA
seeks to address the mental health of young inmates by providing a variety
of activities for them in prison including reading circles, craft and
music workshops, film forums, and a self-help group that focuses on
relationship difficulties, emotional experiences, communication problems,
violence, and conflict resolution. OPERA also works to engage inmates
directly in denouncing human rights abuses that are occurring in the
prisons.
 Ibdaa
Cultural Center: Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Palestine.
The Ibdaa
Cultural Center is receiving funding for a second year to continue
its cultural and sports activities with children and youth, and its
mental health workshops for parents and teachers. Ibdaa runs a very
active after school program (as well as all day programs during school
holidays) that is intended to foster the development of constructive
youth leadership in the face of ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
It does this through a wide array of activities that include sports,
music, art, drama, photography, and film screenings for several hundred
children weekly. Sports groups, in particular, offer a way for children
to channel their resentments and frustrations into productive physical
activity. Ibdaa also sponsors field trips that enable youth who have
few opportunities to leave the refugee camp to meet other youth from
all over Palestine. Ibdaa also hosts crisis intervention workshops for
parents and teachers, and workshops on how to recognize the mental health
needs of youth and be cognizant of their human rights. With continued
funding from MBF, Ibdaa is broadening its focus to include physical
as well as mental health of children in its efforts. The Center has
added to its activities open health days during which doctors and nurses
provide free consultation and treatment for hundreds of children.
 Pastoral
de
Solidaridad y Reconciliación,
San Marcos, Guatemala. The REMHI project of the San Marcos Diocese
was part of an inter-diocesan project that produced the report, "Guatemala:
Never Again," a documentation of human rights violations in the country.
The goal of the project is to motivate the organized participation of
the people in the construction of a new Guatemala and the development
of a more human and dignified life. REMHI is a response at the community
level and emphasizes exposure to history, mental health training, and
human rights for the people of San Marcos, which has a primarily indigenous
population. In 2004, the project will continue with the work of exhumations
and reburials of victims of the violence, which help family members
gain closure and cope with the overwhelming fear of reprisal. It will
continue to commemorate important anniversaries to prevent the obliteration
of the past, and to support the training of community leaders to give
workshops that contribute to reconciliation. It will publish a regional
report of testimonies gathered from the San Marcos area through which
survivors have been able to document the stories of violence, remembering
the past to work together to build a better future. This report will
be distributed widely through the department and beyond, contributing
to furthering community work with San Marcos and serving as a model
for other communities undergoing similar processes within Guatemala.
Return
to Top
English
to Spanish translations
courtesy
of Melisa Flores
©
2007, Ignacio Martín-Baró Fund for Mental Health & Human Rights
|
