Trauma Healing

   Clene, do you consider yourself a part of the global diaspora?

“I do. I have lived outside my homeland of Rwanda for almost 26 years. We moved from Rwanda in 1994 and most of that time, we have spent here in Kenya; so, I see myself so much as a member of the diaspora.”

Who are you working with here in Kenya?

“I am working with diaspora refugees, especially those in refugee camps.”

Can you please describe some of the challenges refugees face?

“Refugees make up a different kind of diaspora. They live in a very unique context, with very unique challenges. They depend fully on UNHCR and other NGOs that are there in the refugee camps to help, but this dependency limits them. They don’t have the right to work, they don’t have the right to do so many other things that normal citizens do.

         “People who are members of the diaspora who are staying in Europe and America receive a status that allows them to work and to live like normal citizens; refugees in Africa don’t receive that. Their lives are completely different from other members of the diaspora who are settled and living integrated fully in the countries where they live.”

You are saying that the refugees in Nairobi are not allowed to have work visas?

“Not in Nairobi alone, throughout Kenya, and in Malawi especially. If you have a refugee status, you are not allowed to work. Even if you want to work, even if you are qualified, you are not allowed to work normally. If you do find a way around the work permit situation, it will be under different circumstances than NGOs or than citizens of the country operate. “

Are there other restrictions?

“The children of refugees cannot easily access education. They can go as far as secondary school, but when they try to go to colleges or universities, they can’t because they don’t have proper IDs to enroll in higher education here in Kenya.”

         “When you go to the refugee camp one picture that you see is so many small children running around in the camp with very minimal care because the parents do not know what to do, they don’t know how they can take care of them. Some do go to school but others are not motivated to go because if you go to school in the refugee camp you do not get properly trained teachers to come and teach; there are no materials.

         “It is sad because there are probably trained teachers among the refugees but they will seldom be allowed to teach, and if they are allowed to teach, they will not be given a salary like any other person. So, those who are qualified will not come to teach because they need to find other ways to earn money so they can support their families.”

Can you please explain your desire to work in this area?

“I think it is mainly because SIL has decided, in this moment of time, to reach out to people in the refugee camps. I became a person that was approached to be part of a team.

         “But if you ask why I am attracted to them, it is because I understand where they are. I have been there before; I can easily identify with their situation. This is true especially when I visit the refugee camp, and I see how mothers are struggling to feed their children, how homes are being broken because of too much trauma. I understand that these people are in a huge depressing situation and they don’t know how to come out of it, and in the process everybody gets stressed and there is a lot of violence because of that. “

How much does your own life experience help you with your work?

“I lived in a refugee camp for a year, and I think that is long enough for me to understand the trouble and the pain that people go through in the refugee camps. Even after I left the camp here in Nairobi, it took me a long time to be able to do what I am doing now.

         “This is because if someone thinks you have been a refugee, the thought that comes to their mind is that you are not worthy, you are not good enough. You have to work very hard to prove to people that you are worthy. I think I have been fortunate to get connected to people in my life who believed that I could actually do something, and encouraged me to go to school. When I finished school people came and encouraged me to try some jobs, and to get out there so that people would know about me. It requires a lot of personal effort, but also it requires people who will come and actually speak for you because you don’t have a voice. Unless someone speaks for you, almost nothing will happen.”

It seems like you really have a heart for refugees.

“I am so passionate about what I do because I know that most of those people don’t have a voice. And, those who speak for them, sometimes they don’t speak accurately for them. So I am determined to speak for them and to speak accurately. I am praying for God to help me be the voice. No matter how small that voice is, I am determined to be that voice, and hopefully raise up some other people who will join me and make that voice so loud that the world can hear!

         “I think that's probably how I can summarize the passion that I have to be an advocate, to be a mouth that will speak whenever I can for those who do not have the opportunity to speak for themselves.”

Can you please describe what you do when you go into the refugee camps?

“I have not gone too many times yet because of COVID. I made 3 visits to Dzaleka Refugee Camp in 2019. We were invited by a local organization, There is Hope, in partnership with the International Association For Refugees.

         “After our first visit in Jan 2019, we planned for our first trauma healing workshop to take place in August 2019. In 2020 we planned so many other visits and training, but none of them happened because of COVID. But, after the first training in 2019, we established some relationships with people and pastors in the refugee camp.

         “After we did the first trauma healing program, what I did, and what I still do is to maintain the contacts with the people we’ve trained, speaking to them often, encouraging them and helping them whenever they need someone to talk to.”

Have you seen any results from the training you did?

 “One lady we trained, Grace, created an organization called Tazama, which is a Swahili word that means “Come and see.” It is based on Psalm 46:8. It basically means that people should come and see what the Lord has done. That is the context of how Tazama was born. Right now Tazama has almost 200 members. What they are doing now is inviting people to come and go through healing groups, and after that they get together and come up with small income generating projects to support each other, and to support themselves.

         “The requirement for anyone to become a member in Tazama is that they need to have gone through healing groups so that everybody starts processing their pain and their grief, and so that together, as a community, they can continue supporting each other. To me that's what probably needs doing among the people who are hopeless. The people I am referring to don’t see any hope at all.

         “Grace told me, ‘I do not want to see women being lonely in their own home. I want all of us together so we can support each other because when people come together they share their fear, they share their laughter and also they dream together.’  That helps them to start rebuilding some sense of dignity, some sense of resilience together as a group, as a community. “

The refugees that you are working with are from what countries?

The ones that are in Malawi are from Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. Those are the major nationalities in the refugee camp in Malawi. But we are also working in South Sudan, and with refugees from Sudan as well, and also in Uganda. They come from different tribal groups.

Have you made any observations about the importance of a good Bible translation for these people?

“I think having a good Bible translation is very important. First of all in these refugee camps, most of the people are really hopeless, and they are looking for something to give them hope. That's why you find so many churches in the refugee camp; that is where they find acceptance. That’s where they find solace. Everywhere else in the camp is so depressing that people come to church so they can escape some of those things. If we don’t have the scriptures in a language that people can understand, that's going to be difficult.

         “In fact in this group that I was talking about, tazama, the trauma healing is almost like opening a door to scripture and helping people to see that actually scripture has something to say about their situation, and every other person’s situation. In some of the testimonies that we have heard, people say that after they have gone through a healing group that now the bible makes sense.

         “In fact one of the requests Grace has  made to me was, when I come back , to please bring nice Bibles because they need Bibles. For instance, if there is a meeting with around 40 people, and only one or two people have a Bible, it is difficult.

         “Since the people in this group speak different languages the challenge is how to find Bibles in all those languages that people can understand.  Mostly we use Swahili to communicate, so I will probably find some Swahili Bibles or some French Bibles. We find that the Bible is the most relevant book for people because it gives people hope, gives people some encouragement. It is the food of life really. And so if people cannot understand it, it becomes a problem.”

Could I conclude that SIL became a vehicle for you to fulfill what God was asking you to do?

“Correct. Somebody saw the potential in me. Somebody saw that I could do the work. Somebody overlooked my status and trusted me and I think that is what we need to do.

         “Diaspora people have skills. Diaspora people are not people who are looking out for handouts. They are people who are looking for opportunities to serve, to make the communities better, and countries better and themselves better. They have just found themselves in a very unfortunate situation. Given the opportunity they can work like any other normal person.”

Do you see people from the diaspora uniquely positioned by God to be used in His kingdom?

“One thing for sure I know, for people in diaspora, because everything else has fallen apart and there is nothing that is credible any longer, one thing that you learn is you learn to hear and to see what other people don’t see. That has helped me a lot.  “And diaspora people are not afraid to start afresh. If you start something and if something falls apart, you are not afraid, you are ready to start again.  Because you have seen it happen to others before. We have seen ourselves losing everything and losing people but then we know that, yes, there is always a second chance. There is always a new opportunity. There are always new wings to fly after you have lost everything that God gives you.  So yah, resilience is the key.”

Clene is a Global Diaspora Team member with SIL. She does trauma healing training workshops for refugees, and is a Bible translation consultant. Clene is married to a Rwandan pastor who works with the Kenyan national church in a training capacity. Clene has six children and one granddaughter.