Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2007, pages 28-29

Beirut Bulletin

UNICEF Extends Helping Hand to Traumatized Children of Lebanon

By Samaa Abu Sharar

DOHA IS NO longer the same following Israel’s war on Lebanon last summer. Much has changed for the 12-year-old girl—especially her sense of security. She hates to admit the fear she felt during that devastating bombardment, and still feels occasionally today. The sound of thunder, for example, reminds her and other Lebanese children of the war they are trying hard to put behind them. “A few days ago I was sitting at home alone when I heard thunderstorm,” Doha recalled. “For a second I thought the war had restarted, and could not stop crying.”

Teacher Noha Al Sayegh, director of the Dar Al Sadek Educational Institute, confirms these young fears. “I have several students aged five who still cry a lot when they hear thunderstorms. They automatically make a link between this sound and that of the bombardment which they had to put up with for over a month,” she explained. “I even have students who are older—some as old as 16—who are still scared when they hear planes. Even if they were civilian jetliners,” she added, “they would run out of the classrooms thinking they might be Israeli warplanes.”

At the Ma’arkah Martyrs School in southern Lebanon, the parents of Doha, Jana, Zeinab, and Zein Addine share their children’s fears. Zeinab’s mother, Mariam Farahat, had to consult a pediatrician about her daughter’s rapid heartbeat. “Till this day, she is still scared,” Mrs. Farahat explained. “If she needs to use the bathroom, she does not dare to go alone, but calls on either me or on her grandmother” to go with her.

It is precisely the enormous effects of the war on thousands of Lebanese children that prompted the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to establish a Psychological Support Program. The program, which is being implemented in cooperation with the Lebanese Ministry of Education and a number of local and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), serves 1,070 public schools in Lebanon.

Through this collective effort, UNICEF is supporting “train-the-trainer” sessions in which trained counselors will provide teachers with the skills to work with children affected by the conflict. This includes identifying and working with distressed children, managing classrooms effectively and contributing to children’s psychosocial well-being. “If you go to the backyard of this school, you see the physical destruction there, but what you don’t see among these students are the emotional scars,” noted Roberto Laurenti, UNICEF representative in Lebanon, while at the Ansarieh Public School in the south of Lebanon. “This program aims at training teachers to better spot kids who show signs of psychological distress.”

UNICEF program assistant Abeer Abou Zaki El Hassanieh explained that specialized educational supervisors will conduct follow-up sessions through field visits to various schools throughout Lebanon to evaluate the effectiveness of the program. Francesca Scarioni, a trainer sent to Lebanon by one of UNICEF’s implementing partners, the Italian NGO INTERSOS, said that in her training she focuses on the instructor’s ability to listen to students. “Following the training,” she explained, “the teacher has to be able to welcome any issue a child might raise and try to encourage the child to express his or her feelings.”

Scarioni encourages instructors to use the participatory approach, whereby the student is not asked to perform a given task but rather to choose with the help of the instructor something to do together. According to Scarioni, “Through games these kids can take control of events, while during the Israeli war they did not have that option.”

Since the beginning of the school year Lebanese teacher Zeina Mehi Eddine, who underwent the training, has been applying the program on her students at Al Mojtaba High School at Hay Al Selom, in the heart of Beirut’s southern district. Through activities such as games, acting, drawing and writing, depending on the age of the child, she and other teachers who received the training were able to pinpoint the different forms of distress these students suffered as a result the war. Mehi Eddine said she and her colleagues did not encounter cases of shock, but rather of pure fear. “One of the things that stopped me,” she said, “was a drawing by an 8-year-old girl who drew a little girl probably her age, with one eye, holding a teddy bear with a broken arm, and a short phrase saying: ‘Adults might forget but can children forget?’”

Mehi Eddine added, however, that many other drawings and poems completed as part of program activities highlighted positive feelings such as victory and pride. These feelings, however, largely depend on the students’ environment, the teacher pointed out, which in Hay Al Selom is very supportive of Hezbollah. One of the popular activities at her particular school, said Mehi Eddine, was meeting with a Hezbollah fighter who answered students’ questions about the war.

According to Dar Al Sadek director Noha Al Sayegh, “One of the things we had to focus on while conducting these training sessions with students was to deal with the issue of students who left the country during the war and were hassled by other students for leaving.” These kids felt like outcasts, Al Sayegh said, because they were accused by other fellow students of running away. The role of the instructors, she explained, was to emphasize that those who left also played a supporting role abroad—through, for instance, demonstrations that took to the streets in several countries to demand an end to the war.

An important component of the evaluations participating schools are expected to submit to UNICEF is a student survey. The feedback at Al Mojtaba High School, Mehi Eddine said, was largely positive. According to 9-year-old Jumana Mahmadi, “These activities have contributed to comforting us following a war that lasted 33 days. It also made us feel happy and allowed us to express our feelings and opinions.” Eight-year-old Fatima Alawiah agreed, explaining, “These activities made us feel that there are people standing by us who understand what we feel.” Others spoke of being able to express feelings they had been holding back in their hearts, and some said the activities helped them bring back some kind of normalcy into their lives.

And in today’s turbulent Lebanon, some kind of normalcy is exactly what the country’s children—and, for that matter, adults—desperately need.

Samaa Abu Sharar is a free-lance journalist based in Beirut.

< Prev		Next >