A very fruitful meeting

Sunday July 30^th

Not your ordinary Sunday.

Several members of the LNPI met on Sunday: Carla, Diala, Elsa, Gehane, Jihad, Lamya, Naya, Serge, Siham, Valérie. The aim of the meeting was to assess the work already done and to set an agenda for our future meetings and activities. We decided to concentrate our efforts on three projects:

- Psychological assistance

The psychological team had met on Saturday with Sister Caroline to set up a program with her. Sister Caroline is the coordinator of relief work in several displaced centres in Achrafieh. The team had decided to shift its focus from trauma relief to working in Displaced Centres and assisting the displaced population in coping with it’s new setting.

After spending several hours observing the interactions in one of the centres (Salma  Sayegh school), assessing the psychological needs of its population and discussing them,  the team decided to work on three different groups : the displaced mothers, the displaced children and the volunteers.

The first meeting with the volunteer group was scheduled for the coming Tuesday.

- Short film project

During our Sunday meeting we worked for three hours on the short film project. The initial idea was to make a group of displaced children work on the production of a short film illustrating a general topic such as “together” (Sawa) or “the encounter” (al-iltliqa’).

We worked on the program, discussed several activities that would entertain the children while making them work on the production of a short animated film.

We agreed to operate in several displaced centres, each one producing one short film. We thought it best to mix displaced children with those living around the displaced centre (most of which are public schools). By doing so, we would be creating ties between two different populations that formerly didn’t know each other and that would be living in the same neighbourhoods for several weeks and probably months. We will be filming our activities so as to produce a 40 minute documentary entitled al-iltiqa’ (the encounter).

- New banners and slogans for peaceful demonstrations

Protests have been organised on daily basis in downtown Beirut. The most violent one had taken place around noon.

We felt completely unrepresentative in these protests. And most of us had already participated in marches, walking behind banners which we didn’t fully agree with.

Lebanese children and war related trauma

Thurdsay, July 20th

Following the peace march, Naya, Gehanne and me called on the Association for the protection of war children. Ms Myrna Gannagé who heads this NGO is a clinical psychologist who has been working on war related trauma for many years now. Her NGO is very active in Southern Lebanon where it has two clinics that work with Lebanese children traumatised by the Israeli bombings of 1996.

We called on her to get some information on war-related trauma and to see if we could coordinate some activities together.  

Comfort children

More and more families with children are fleeing South-Lebanon and Dahié. The Israeli army has called earlier today for the complete evacuation of Nabatieh, South-Lebanon’s second largest town.NGOs, state institutions and political groups are managing the influx of the displaced providing shelter, food, medical aid and other services.The basic needs of the young are being catered for, but how are they managing the trauma of war, of displacement, of bombardment, of evacuation and destruction.

Now that the Lebanese society has responded to the humanitarian crisis, and organized itself accordingly, we should start thinking of ways to alleviate the suffering of the displaced children by proposing different actions and activities to help them cope with their new situation.