After two years of operations, the BW4KIDS storytelling project has brought together a corps of 40 elderly refugee storytellers from four different villages who have stepped out of their isolation and joined together to make a difference in their communities. Recruited to tell stories to children, trained in positive parenting skills and in the deep listening offered by Focusing Initiatives International, they have, inadvertently, become a community resource.
When their storytelling terms ended and BW4KIDS moved on to a new village, the grandparents were each given a token of appreciation in the form of a small gift of money (about $20). But they were not satisfied. They had become accustomed to meeting together for mutual support and coordination of their storytelling schedules. They did not want to retreat back into isolation.
So one group of storytellers volunteered to assist in the orientation of the next group. And that carried forward as each group stepped forward to support the next. And then it just felt right for them to continue to meet regularly. At first perhaps they met just to maintain the social bonds they had formed during the program. But it soon became clear that their meetings were more than that. They valued the ties they had formed with the children and their families, and they enjoyed their role in the community as representatives of cultural traditions and wisdom.
The grandparents invited BW4KIDS founder Daniel Ocean to attend one of their meetings. After listening to them, Daniel asked them to take some time to think about what they might do together to make life better for themselves and their neighbors. After much discussion over several weeks, they pooled the money they had been given to purchase some chickens. They plan to sell eggs and also raise more chickens. The money they earn will provide micro-loans to their neighbors, which will be repaid with interest to add to their funds for more micro-loans.
This feels like a big step in a new direction. The grandparents are here to stay, and their potential is huge. At present, the 40 storytellers speak two languages, Swahili and Kenya busha, and are able to communicate well enough with local translation solutions. As BW4KIDS continues its storytelling program in village after village, more grandparents will emerge, each one speaking their local village dialect, each one bonding with his or her peers in neighboring villages. As BW4KIDS expands, these creative thinkers will find ways to cross language barriers as they welcome new members to their society.
And the grandparents have more than stories to offer. And possibly more than chickens and eggs. They have years of life experience behind them and, through BW4KIDS, they have received training in resilience skills and in reflective listening.
A speaker at a recent meeting of the Regional Interagency Coordination meeting for South Western Uganda reported a high number of cases of suicide among forcefully displaced persons. At this point there are only twelve Mental health professionals providing psychosocial support services (MHPSS) to the 138,480 refugees currently residing in Nakivale. There is no funding available for professional counselors. Nor is it clear that there are sufficient numbers of multilingual MHPSS counselors available to be recruited.
The BW4KIDS storytellers naturally come to mind as a valuable and underutilized resource – an organized group of adults with preliminary training in Focusing and resilience skills who could serve as peer counselors for distressed members of their villages. The grandparents are already accepted in their communities as people of status and recognized as reliable helpers. Some additional training in the Focusing process, combined with their years of experience and their reservoir of traditional wisdom, might well be all that is needed.
Naturally they will find their own path forward, but this is one clear example of the kind of difference these energized and caring grandparents can make in the Nakivale settlement.