Nepal Challenge by Steve_Shears

April 8th Godawari, Kathmandu

The taxi ride over to the Esther Benjamins Trust was a bit hellish - we did battle with the Kathmandu traffic and the heat and passed guys riding bikes with enormous gas cyliders hanging off them! Transport in Nepal is a very inventive thing I decided!

I had gone to meet Dilu who worked for the EBT and who also was doing a counselling psychology course in Kathmandu. I was pleased to be meeting her as I knew Philip who was the director of EBT in Nepal held her in high regard. I had made some contribution as far as finance went with doing the sponsored trek but this was an opportunity to contribute in a different way to the lives of the kids.

Dilu herself radiated an air of calm and a profound sense of what it was that the kids faced in relation to being people who were dislocated in terms of family and place and the sense of their psychology as a result of their experiences of human traffick, being in prison with parents and being street kids. It took me a little time to get used to her shaking her head and smiling a lot as we talked -because in India and Nepal that head shaking means the person is in tune with you and agrees with what you are saying -whereas in our culture it means something different of course! We discussed psychological trauma in cultural terms too as there could easily be an assumption made that all children (and adults) respond in exactly the same way to trauma or think about adverse experiences in the same way we do in the West. Culture mediates everything - including experiences of hardship and trauma. Suffering and expectations. is also viewed from a different perspective in places like Nepal. That said, Dilu knew that some of the kids did struggle with their feelings sometimes or saw their futures in fairly bleak terms and this sometimes made it hard to reach them. As a therapist herself this was frustrating for her and she welcomed any techniques or ideas for helping to engage some of the kids. I said that when I had talked to Philip two years ago I had said that I thought that the way the refuge was run and the dedication of the staff and the resilience of the kids went a long way to helping to heal some of the hurts - it was a 'secure base' as John Bolwby might have said.

I gave her the books I had brought with me and we discussed play therapy techniques as practiced in the West and I handed over the playmobile figures that could be used in non-directive sandtray work. She also found the ideas from Solution Focused Brief Therapy conversations with children interesting and I said I would email her some stuff about this when I got back to the UK. In all it felt like a productive meeting of East and West experiences and philosophies and I hoped that in some small way it might help the kids.

THE MOTHER OF INVENTION - OBVIOUSLY!