HEALING CHILD TRAUMA VICTIMS IS NO QUICK FIX

ON SATURDAY, I attended the musical showcase of The Kronendal Music Academy in Hout Bay.

Working with children from Imizamo Yethu, Hangberg and Hout Bay and led by Dwyn Griesel, the Academy is an explosion of hope in otherwise depressing community circumstances.

Hout Bay’s 28 square kilometres could not be a more contrasting context – wealth and poverty, classist and caring – the town illustrates the fragmentation of South Africa for all to see.

But Griesel and her team show that change in any community is a process over time, not just a point in time. They understand that the work of transforming the lives of children and community begins by transforming the world of the children and the Hout Bay community from within.

What many community agencies don’t understand about development theory is that you cannot change that which you are unwilling to be deeply associated with, for change in an individual or any context always occurs from within, never from outside.

The change agent is a caring human, not a distant do-gooder. Our violence-prone communities are not changing because many civil society groups act like self-righteous distant strangers instead of caring change agents.

In the grotesque tension between donor funding demands and sanitised NGO brands, many NGOs have rightfully joined the discourse of condemning the murderers and the violent.

However, many have also failed to educate them, play with them and include them when they were just young children, because they were “disruptive” or “difficult”.

No one took the time to heal them when they suffered early childhood trauma. They were discarded when they became “difficult teenagers”. Only the youth who “showed potential” were worked with.

The youth who carried the seeds of childhood trauma and the manifestations of future violence were discarded when they arrived as “difficult 9-yearolds”.

These sanitised development practices have turned many NGOs into specialists at displaying “distant compassion”.

Fear of losing funding or of having no “good stories to tell” have allowed corrupted development practices of separating people and their pain to become normative. Yet nothing inspires a “difficult child” as much as knowing that the agent of change is courageous enough to be with them.

But what if NGOs were brave enough to tell donors “we are worried about the trauma and the potential for violence”?

What if NGOs were brave enough to tell donors not to expect immediate success – not for the next 15 years?

What if NGOs told everyone they would need to spend the next 25 years working with these traumatised children to help them not to become violent murderers or drug addicts?

Donors, NGOs and communities should stop seeking immediate success. We should all start embracing long-term solutions.

We should be willing to tell stories of utter failure. Talk about the difficult, the traumatised, the violent and the disruptive. Don’t sanitise development. Talk about the endless failed starts. There are donors who would want to hear about that. We need to pursue costly transformative change. Such change costs. But it is also costly in terms of human commitment.

Dwyn Griesel is one such human. When midway into her pupils’ Gala Showcase to donors and parents on Saturday, load shedding happened, the children played on.

That’s the change we all want to see — children who have learnt to play on through the trauma.