Safe Place & Butterfly Hug

My days have been very busy and with the electricity going off due to the lack of rain (hydraulic pressure is used to create electricity) and the Internet often being unavailable, I have not been able to post an entry until today. I am actually sitting in the back of a car, during a very long wait at a bank where Woiny is attempting to change Ethiopian currency into dollars for a trip to Canada tonight. This is the second branch we have tried and all the banks close down in half an hour. A woman has just come out of the bank to say that Woiny is still waiting, but that it looks promising for her. Apparently the major inflation that has hit Ethiopia due to the US financial collapse has resulted in dollars being incredibly scarce. (The first bank, established 50 years ago, is pictured on the sign.)

Part of the EMDR supervision and training I am doing with Woiny and Zebeney is to teach them how to use EMDR with groups of children as well as with individuals. To practice we went to Hope For Children's kindergarten class yesterday to teach them about emotions and how to create a feeling of safety when they are frightened or upset.

The children were so excited that they immediately surrounded us and almost pulled me down to the ground as we arrived. Their enthusiasm and exuberance is quite different than that of many other Ethiopian children.

Ethiopians are not trained about emotions and especially about them having a physical correlate in the body. We decided to introduce emotions to the entire class and then when the children come to therapy, they will not have as hard a time understanding.

Once they could mimic feelings of sadness, we discussed the feeling of being safe and asked them each to draw a picture of a real or imaginary place that makes them feel safe. For many children, the time they feel the safest is when they hide under their beds. Even the adults that I spoke with agreed that this is what they did as children. And although they were able to imagine a safe place, when they were asked to draw it, some of them reverted to drawing pictures that they had been recently drawn in class, such as a cat. Of those that understood, many of them drew pictures of a house or a tree.

After the drawings were done, we taught the children the butterfly hug to help them install the feeling of being safe, calm or comfortable while they looked at their pictures. All of this happened in Amharic, needless to say, but there was no mistaking their reactions and the pictures here speak for themselves.

Zebenay will come back again soon and continue to work with these new concepts and we hope the teacher will do so also. We translated a feeling chart in Amharic, laminated it and left one for the wall of each classroom.