Apologies for the lengthy blog but in this time of afrophobic violence I thought it is a very relevant article for all to read to offer another perspective, one which I feel is relevant whether the violence is blatant or not.
Keynote at the Capacitar
20th Anniversary Global
Celebration
LIVING AND SURVIVING IN
A MULTIPLY WOUNDED COUNTRY
MARTHA CABRERA
Trauma and pain afflict not only
individuals. When they become widespread and ongoing, they affect entire
communities and even the country as a whole. As this socially conscious
psychologist explains, the implications are serious for people's health, the
resilience of the country's social fabric, the success of development schemes,
and the hope of future generations.
When we began working from the Valdivieso Center in 1997, one year before
Hurricane Mitch, virtually no one was looking at the issues we wanted to deal
with: the subjective, the psychological, the spiritual. We called our effort "affective
and spiritual reconstruction." Six years on, we recognize the profound
ignorance with which we launched this effort and are celebrating how much we
have learned.
Why have so many workshops not worked?
One of the questions we asked ourselves back then, and are still asking, is
what has happened to the millions invested in training in Nicaragua and what
good has it left behind, because there isn't a community in this country that
hasn't received a workshop on something. Everybody has been
"workshopped." There have been workshops on gender, on environment,
on civic participation, to name just a few. All the realities, not to mention
all the vogues that international cooperation suggests and at times imposes
have been topics of workshops all over the country. But with so much effort put
into so many workshops and seminars, why were the results so poor? Why, despite
so much training, were people not responding to the seriousness of the
problems? Why weren't they mobilizing and making demands?
After reflecting on the factors contributing to this passivity, we had come up
with some ideas and intuitions on the subject. And we had already obtained a
series of results that seemed interesting to us when Hurricane Mitch hit, so we
were able to use our experience on how to work with the personal dimension. We
initiated a process that led us to travel through a good part of Nicaragua:
León, Chinandega, Nueva Segovia, Estelí, Matagalpa. We spent a lot of time in
Posoltega, the area most devastated by the hurricane. It was on those tours
that we realized the deeper problem and formulated our approach: Nicaragua is a
multiply wounded, multiply traumatized, multiply mourning country.
How did we reach that insight? Working on the emotional recovery of the
survivors of Hurricane Mitch, we found that while people wanted to talk about
their immediate losses, they had an even greater need to talk about other
losses that they had never voiced before. Many women in León and Chinandega
would come up to us and say, for example, "Look, I'm really sad about
losing my house, but I want to tell you about something else that was even
harder." And we began to listen to their stories. Many women told us
things they had kept bottled up, such as: "You know what hurts me most? I
suffer from insomnia. And you know why? Because I lie awake worried about my
husband spending the night in my daughter's bed, touching her."
We also found many wounds related to Nicaragua's political history. I still
recall a man we were working with from Chinandega, who relived his earlier
traumatic experiences as he was rescuing cadavers buried in the mudslide caused
by Hurricane Mitch on the Casita volcano in Posoltega. "There came a
moment," he told us, "when I just couldn't go on because the smell of
death brought back horrible memories from my experience in the military
service." We heard such stories over and over again. Women talking about
rape, sexual abuse, incest and other kinds of domestic violence; many, many of
the men, and women too, talking about the war, the fighting, the flight into
exile in Honduras. For our team members, all of whom had come from the
Sandinista side, these represented "the other face of the war."
Creating spaces to talk about pain
When we began coming up against all these realities, we decided to change our
approach. We began to create spaces in which people could talk about their
other painful experiences, and thus to find ourselves with what we now call the
"inventory of wounds." We worked a whole year after Mitch with those
affected by the hurricane and found an enormous amount of losses, of personal
and community wounds that had not been processed or even brought into the open,
and had thus not been surmounted, which was the worst part. For a variety of
reasons, including the quick succession of dramatic and traumatic events in
Nicaragua, people had been unable to work through their experiences. When we
asked people to reflect on the impact of what they had suffered and how they
had dealt with it, the first thing we discovered was that they had never had
enough time to process it. Cultural factors also had an influence in this lack
of processing, as did the fact that people have not had the community resources
to deal with such problems, and the grassroots and social organizations have
always minimized or totally ignored them. We found ourselves beginning to
identify and follow what would be one of the guiding threads of our work:
accompanying people in processing their wounds, which always involved
acknowledging, expressing and reflecting.
Once we had developed a fairly wide-ranging and very serious picture of what we
began to call the "multiple wounds phenomenon," we began discussing
it with those working on development or community projects all over Nicaragua.
But they didn't seem to get it. The most they would say to us was, "So
what do you want us to do, put a psychologist in the project?" We thus
discovered an enormous lack of knowledge about the manifestations and
consequences of this phenomenon.
Linking physical health and
psychological wounds
At the same time we were inventorying all the traumas and other afflictions and
getting a feel for this lack of knowledge, we began to seek tools that would
help create some understanding among those working in development. One of the
bridges we discovered was to inventory the population's health conditions
parallel to the inventory of psychological wounds. When we met with groups,
with communities, we would ask the people to indicate the most important losses
they had suffered and also tell us about the state of their personal health.
That helped us find more manifestations of the multiple wounds phenomenon,
which are social and political as well as personal. We observed that a series
of chronic somatic illnesses - gastritis, colitis, migraines, etc. - closely
connected to unprocessed traumas were among the most frequent and serious
personal manifestations. We also found that the state of our population's
health in the area of psychosomatic illnesses was truly deplorable. Using their
health state was a very useful way to get people to open up more, since it is a
topic that does not make people feel defensive or threatened. When we began our
workshops by doing the health and illness inventory, it tended to surprise
people: "What's this? I come to a workshop on development and political
advocacy and the next thing I know you're asking me about my health." But
while the approach catches them off guard, it works.
The social and political manifestations, on the other hand, are not as
immediate, not as easy to access. When a person does not or cannot work through
a trauma right away, its social consequences, the most frequent of which are
apathy, isolation and aggressiveness, are only revealed over time. We
understood that there's a close connection between so many accumulated wounds
and traumas and the behavior that can be seen today in the large number of
Nicaraguans who insist they "don't want to know any more about
politics," or "don't want to get involved in anything."
Unprocessed traumas and other wounds and grief explain much of the current lack
of mobilization.
When one has a lot of accumulated pain, one loses the capacity to communicate
with others. The ability to communicate, to be flexible and tolerant is
enormously reduced among people who have a number of unresolved personal
traumas. The characteristics vital to a person's ability to function adequately
become affected. The loss of solidarity that we lament in today's Nicaragua has
to do with loss of trust between people. An incredible amount of money has been
spent in this country on programs to build and strengthen institutional
capacity, not just in state institutions but also in nongovernmental and local
grassroots organizations. But the strengthening of an institution is based on
mutual trust and that is one of the things that's lost when there is an
accumulation of pain and misplaced intolerance and inflexibility.
The cultural angle: gender
socialization
Our work quickly led us to coincide with an anthropologist who was also doing
work along similar lines in the rural world, but particularly from the cultural
angle. We discovered one of the main cultural reasons why people don't process
their grief, and that was when we came up against the cultural machismo that is
so deeply rooted in Nicaragua. We learned through our daily practice that the
way one expresses emotions, which always has physiological repercussions, is
not innate but learned, and this learning is always based on gender
socialization. Men and women don't express their emotions the same way because
they've been taught to do it differently. If I as a woman have learned that the
emotion permitted me is sadness, because there's a feminine model that tells me
that we women have to suffer, be good and put up with things, I allow myself to
complain and cry. This model also allows me to express guilt, but not rage,
because if a woman does that then people say "she's really pissed off;
she's acting like a man!" The emotions men can express and the way they
can express them are also taught. Men are only allowed to express anger, even
violence, but never fear, guilt or sadness, and they can never cry. They pay
dearly for that repression of their emotions, as do the women close to them.
Our work has obliged us to study emotions in depth. When one is sad, it's not
something that affects an ear or a foot; it runs through the whole body.
Emotion is energy in motion. That's why fury can make the entire body go rigid.
The emotions resulting from being wounded, from trauma, which are rage,
sadness, fear and guilt, automatically generate bodily changes. The body is
wise and uses these changes to invite us to express the emotion. Emotion is a
sign that we're alive. When we feel sad about having lost something or
someone, that sadness is a sign of life. When people acknowledge pain, sadness
or some other profound emotion, they usually give themselves the time needed to
digest it, and when they express and reflect on it, the emotion continues its
normal course, eventually dissipating. But when that acknowledgement is blocked
for whatever reason, the emotions - which have an impact on the immune system,
the neurological system, the circulatory system, the whole body - trigger
physiological changes in blood pressure, temperature, digestion, and end up
making us ill. There's always a tight relationship between the illnesses we
suffer and the emotions we repress.
Together with the study of emotions and psychology, about which there is little
generalized understanding in Nicaragua, the gender perspective gave us another
piece that helped us put the puzzle together better. It has been documented in
Nicaragua, for example, that after the war of the eighties ended, there was
increase in domestic violence in households where the men had participated in
the war. These men had lived through very tough situations on the battlefield
without being able to process them or express any emotion about them because of
the learned masculinity model. On top of that, they went from being soldiers
and officers defending their country or values to being jobless and ignored by
an inhumane system. The only way they found to express their pain was through
violence and aggressiveness, because that's the only way men have learned to
express their emotions and shake off their traumas.
How do you empower a traumatized
population?
With a clearer picture of what was happening and what we had to do, we began
asking ourselves how to make the best use of all these findings to benefit
people organized around development projects. A year and a half after Mitch we
were invited to a meeting with the municipal mayors of the departments of Nueva
Segovia, Madriz and Estelà à , and one of the questions we asked was whether
they knew anything about the social manifestations of phenomena such as
Mitch. Most of the mayors said they did not. This reality is both serious
and shocking. Virtually all development projects, from big ones like those run
by the United Nations to the small community-based projects of a sister city
group, always include among their objectives the now fashionable concept of
"empowerment." But how does one empower a traumatized population? We
tried to get the mayors to understand the social subjects they were working
with, why people very often don't want to participate in their development schemes,
why they don't want to participate, for example, in rebuilding their own
houses. It is often said that people don't want to change, aren't interested in
the project, don't want to develop. But it is seldom asked why people feel that
way. One of the chief answers is trauma, accumulated pain. This can be very
easily illustrated: when people are hit by a car on the street, they don't just
get up, brush off the gravel, go on to work and forget about it. The very least
they will do is tell others about what happened, get it off their chest, tend
their wounds. Well, Nicaragua hasn't just been hit by a car; it has been run
over by a long train!
When I told those mayors to write down their personal history, their
"river of life," I found the same story I had repeatedly come across
all over the country: they burned my house; I had to go into exile in Honduras;
they killed my brother. Development projects continue to ignore this kind of
personal history, which weighs so heavily in each of us. The great majority of
training sessions, of educational or empowerment programs, consist of calling a
meeting of community leaders to teach them tools with which to work with the
population. But who are these leaders? What do those doing the teaching know of
their personal history? Ignoring the personal history of people one is trying
to teach in such a battered country is evidence of an educational model that
the Left has not yet shaken off. It is based on denying the person, the
individual, the subjective, on conceiving of individuals as links in a
transmission chain towards a more impersonal collective project that is always
supposedly for the greater good.
Assuming our personal and national
history
In Estelí, we had the opportunity to have input into a project called Formation
of Local Development Promoters, in which we could bring institutions together.
We worked for a year and a half on the personal histories of 90 promoters from
36 organizations, providing them with a great number of tools to then help
other people deal with their own histories. We also gave them tools to be able
to reflect on Nicaragua's history and culture.
This is an extremely complex challenge, because from 1990 forward, we
Nicaraguans have not been able to acquire a critical distance from the history
we have lived through. Even the textbooks have been changed twice and they now
have such an ideological slant that they don't allow the new generations the
necessary distance either. These books polarize us; they continue reproducing
the same two political bands. In response to this problem, we've also made an
effort to prepare new texts that might help us see history more critically. We
were recently in Costa Rica working with Nicaraguan migrants there, and we
observed the same thing. There is so much accumulated pain in those who
suffered during the revolution for siding with the Resistance, as well as among
those who suffered for supporting the Sandinistas and had to emigrate earlier,
during the Somoza era. In both cases, the experience and the unprocessed pain
have prevented them from being able to see their history through other eyes and
move beyond it.
Rethinking organizational models and
changing leadership styles
All this led us to another issue: the organizational one. In Nicaragua, a great
many organizations want to do "open heart surgery with a machete," as
one observer quipped. They want to "change the world," but do nothing
to change an old-fashioned model within the organization itself and thus
reproduce a leadership style that blocks any real change. Daniel Ortega and
Arnoldo Alemán are far from the only caudillos in this country. That
political boss syndrome is reproduced in social organizations, in NGOs, in all
sectors of our society. The question is not whether we have democratic organizations,
but whether we can have them. We've discovered that it's very difficult to
build democracy when a country's personal history still hurts.
Many efforts are being made in Nicaragua. Anywhere one goes, one finds an
abundance of projects. But we have to return to the question of why so much
effort is failing to bear fruit. In part, it is because activism abounds while
theory is rejected. Any first world university would pay good money to
come and study our country, yet we Nicaraguans have still not come up with a
theory about it. When one works with organizations and offers them a pamphlet
with new ideas, and a new theory, everybody grabs for a copy, sticks it in a
pocket then never reads it. So we're always returning to our reality with the
same tools as always, ones that no longer work. If Paulo Freire were still
alive, he would be shocked and hurt to see how popular education has become so
diluted in Nicaragua. It is nothing but an endless cycle of working groups
"systematizing" their discussions on drawing-paper flip charts. How
can we change our reality when popular education is reduced to that and when
organizations are doing the same old thing over and over without questioning
why it leads nowhere?
Although the multiple wounds phenomenon cannot explain all of this, it does
explain a lot and affects nearly all of Nicaragua. Most of those promoting
development processes all over the country today are themselves affected by
traumatic situations. Our task has been to convince those very people that they
have to deal with this problem, but their typical response is: Why get caught
up in all that when a self-esteem workshop would do? But it's not enough.
Experience has shown us that when we ask community leaders to talk about their
life, many are taken aback at first, but afterwards they all thank us for it
because it helps them understand and move forward.
Social change requires personal change
Personal change is key to organizational processes. There can be no social
change without personal change, because one is forced to fight every day to
achieve that change. Our proposal for accompanying organizations currently has
four major areas. The first module focuses on the personal sphere, which is
where crises, wounds, health, the conception of healing, life style and
holistic health habits come in. A second module is historical-cultural, in
which we try to understand how our personal life is marked by the country's
history and the national culture and we explain how many dysfunctional
strategies our culture has and how they are expressed. The third module is the
organizational one and the fourth is dedicated to development. Practice has
helped us avoid seeing these four modules as separate and we constantly try to
make connections among them. Depending on the organization, we give space to
spirituality in the historical-cultural element, because we have found that
many people in the eighties found meaning, their reason for being, in the
revolution, but have not identified with any religion or spirituality since it
ended and thus feel a profound emptiness. It is important for people to explore
their spiritual dimension to improve their own mental and physical health, and
to improve the functioning of their organizations. This is why we work a lot
with rituals, using them as tools that can pull groups together.
By introducing the concept of personal healing into the organizations, we are
able to reveal people's wounds and explain to them the correct way to deal with
trauma, with pain, through three simple steps: acknowledge what happened,
express what happened and reflect on what happened. But while this may be the
right way, it's not easy in a society that denies the widespread nature of
sexual abuse within families, the incredibly high level of incest around us.
How can this be cured if society refuses to discuss it? How are we going to
heal the country's main political wounds if we have not yet reflected on them?
When we go into organizations wanting to reflect on these things, they often
respond, "What are you looking to do, destroy the
organization?" Reflection is avoided because it involves separating
the good from the bad, the correct from the incorrect. Many people from both
the Sandinista band and the anti-Sandinista band still have a lot of difficulty
accepting the errors committed, expressing these problems, reflecting on them.
They believe that to accept, talk about and reflect on them does harm rather
than heals. Our effort amounts to nothing more than providing tools so that
people can begin these personal and collective healing processes.
Structuring the healing process
The healing process must have a beginning and an end. All the theories say so.
We soon realized that we needed to go into this not just getting people to talk
about their losses, but helping them discover that talking about them would
produce a gain. We also discovered an approach to explain that traumas block
the energy that circulates through one's body and that there are ways to
unblock it. It is has been studied and proven that people who suffer from the
multiple wounds phenomenon have much less energy. The reason is simple: every
time a person suffers and doesn't process that suffering, the first thing that
is restricted is their breathing capacity. Every time we suffer an aggression,
our body reacts, shrinks into itself, tenses up. And the first effect of that
reaction is to reduce the amount of oxygen that the body takes in. And when the
body receives less oxygen, it has less energy available. The Eastern cultures
have known about this for thousands of years, which is why breathing is at the
core of so many oriental techniques.
Once people have worked on the state of their health, we move on to theory and
explain the process of dealing with their pain. After doing that, we invite
them to go to their personal history, which they can do using the river of life
method, or other methods. We put a lot of emphasis on the importance of
improving interpersonal relationships to be able to work on pain. The personal
module consists of three very active, very lucid workshops lasting two and a
half days. What is called popular education today has lost a lot of its gaiety,
its games and laughter. And games have great healing power. Healing doesn't
always have to involve tears. It's important to provide the group with a
continuous flow of tools, until people understand that they have the power to
heal themselves and assume personal responsibility for doing so. The suicide
rate has shot up in Nicaragua, but while suicide is yet another manifestation
of the multiple wounds phenomenon, we shouldn't center all reflection on it.
There are other daily ways of avoiding pain that are slower forms of suicide
and are much more common in our country. Alcoholism, as an example, is very
widespread in Nicaragua and even in the organizations, but no one has really
reflected on this problem.
The importance of collective healing
and assuming personal responsibility
Multiply wounded societies run the risk of becoming societies with
inter-generational traumas. It is virtually a law that one treats others the
way one treats oneself. Anywhere that large population groups are traumatized,
the trauma is transferred to the next generation. Working with the multiple
wound phenomenon means accepting that the wounds are collective as well as
personal. Nicaragua's revolution was a collective phenomenon, but any dealing
with the pain represented by the loss of the revolution has been individual.
And today, 12 years after the Sandinistas' 1990 electoral defeat, we still find
many people in workshops who have not gotten over that defeat. Our field work
has led us to believe that we have to talk about that past, in fact our whole
past history, if we want to heal ourselves.
One doesn't need a psychologist to heal oneself. In many modern
conceptions, healing is a collective challenge based on the recognition that my
pain, your pain, the other person's pain are similar. And if we are to
collectively heal ourselves, we need to undergo a cultural change. Why is it
that people don't talk? Because they are subjected to the strong cultural
mandate that "dirty laundry is washed at home."
In essence, healing has to do with the process of assuming personal
responsibility. It means that I assume responsibility for my life, for curing
myself. And assuming that responsibility involves distancing myself from this
country's traditional leadership model and building a new one. It's not an easy
assignment. The leaders in the old Nicaraguan model are hypocritical - leftists
outside of their home and fascists within. Proposing to heal oneself personally
reveals this contradiction and assures us of a new leadership for the future in
which there is coherence between the personal and public spheres. Our
leadership model has traditionally generated problems rather than resolving
them as our leaders feed off political polarization and foment it. This is
currently a very relevant problem: we recycle political and social leaders and
they recycle ideas. Meanwhile, organizations don't know how to confront such
leadership, whether out of a lack of capacity or exhaustion.
We urge community leaders to review their lifestyle because we've discovered
that, despite all the self-esteem workshops, people plod on without taking care
of themselves. We've gone to communities where the heat is unbearable, yet when
we ask people if they're drinking a lot of water they say no. They don't even
take on board something as simple as this basic care for oneself. Where does
development begin if it doesn't begin within oneself? Where does leadership
begin, if one doesn't take responsibility for oneself and provide the example?
Leadership of others abounds, but it's a leadership that no longer functions.
What we need is leadership that starts with the personal, leaders who lead from
their own values, their own life, but that's a lot more complicated than the do
as I say, not as I do syndrome.
In one workshop in Costa Rica with a group of 25 Nicaraguan migrants, we
uncovered 60 psychosomatic illnesses. Having emigrated to Costa Rica,
Nicaraguans add the pain of being a migrant to the many wounds they brought
with them from Nicaragua. We discovered that being Nicaraguan is painful
outside of the country, particularly in Costa Rica, because it is contrasted to
Costa Rican identity and Nicaraguans feel ashamed of who they are because they
have a negative vision of their own history. We talked a lot about being
uprooted and told them that if they want to build solid organizations as
migrants, the first root they have to put down is inside themselves. If they
want to build these organizations, they have to deal with reflecting on
Nicaragua's history, which could appear to be an irrelevant past but is in fact
present within them. This is because pain doesn't run on chronological time, which
is only one way of measuring time. It runs on psychological time, which moves
to a different beat. When a person is raped, for example, the body has a memory
of that violation. When a person suffers sexual abuse at age five, that wound
remains in the present even if the person is now thirty. The memory of it may
be blocked for survival purposes, but it will be present in many forms:
nightmares, fears, ways of relating to others, the person's health.
It is essential to understand that all painful experiences that are not worked
through are expressed not only in the person, but also in the organizations.
The frequently offered advice that one should leave one's own problems behind
when one goes to work is erroneous, if only because it is impossible. People
take their baggage with them everywhere they go. It is also essential not to
see wounds and traumas just in their negative sense. They are a source of
experience and wisdom. In fact, working through personal trauma is nothing
other than transforming it into wisdom for oneself and for others.
Finding meaning helps find new energy
Populations that are multiply wounded as a product of permanent stress lose
their capacity to make decisions and plan for the future due to the excess
suffering they have lived through and not processed. But when people begin to
talk about their history, assume it and reflect on it, a fundamental process
takes place that is not achieved by traditional training programs: people find
meaning and significance in what they have lived through. Reconstructing the
sense of our national and personal histories is a path to understanding that
there is meaning in what we are and what we have lived through despite
everything, and this is what allows us to go forward in life. But going forward
is only possible if people can find new energy.
We begin to reconstruct both the social fabric and ourselves insofar as we
allow ourselves to work through our personal history and open ourselves up to
this possibility. So many projects have the stated goal of "reconstructing
the social fabric," but who reconstructs a society's fabric? People do. So
first we have to reconstruct people. This recognition should lead us to analyze
the development model we are proposing in our projects. Are they really people-centered
projects?
The unity of mind, body and spirit
How do we create a holistic, attractive development approach that provides
results? We have discovered the importance of understanding the unity of mind,
body and spirit to achieve this. Unfortunately, Western tradition has created
three separate professions - psychologists, physicians and religious personnel
- to deal with what is really a single reality. The fact is that we are one
thing: mind, body and spirit. In our proposed process for working through pain
and reconstructing ourselves, we have learned to work with the body through
dance, music, tai chi, meditation and relaxation exercises. And we do it in the
conviction that the body has a tremendous healing capacity, its own potential
to reconstruct itself. We have learned that when people talk about and assume
their personal experience and begin to find sense in their life, it is easier
to propose a change of habits and a healthier life, and thus people begin to
shake off many bodily ills that were beating them down. Working with the body
is an excellent way of helping people feel that they can change.
On the issue of development, we have embraced the "Development on a Human
Scale" approach of the Chilean, Manfred Max Neef. This author has
formulated a matrix of human needs that includes those related to subsistence
as well as others related to affection, belonging, identity, creativity. He
also establishes a distinction between satisfiers and compensators. In
Nicaragua, for example, prostitution compensates for the lack of a sex life,
but does not satisfy the need for it. A satisfier is fresh orange juice, and a
compensator is orange colored soda pop. It's important for organizations to
reflect on what they are promoting: satisfiers or compensators. Max Neef also
argues that rather than continuing to speak of poverty, we must speak of
poverties, and that a chronic lack of any satisfier amounts to poverty. This
approach has helped us integrate the personal, historical-cultural and
organizational approaches, in the knowledge that we cannot continue separating
personal and social development. To develop, Nicaragua needs to address the
problems in a more comprehensive way, in which we never stop learning or
understanding. International aid projects impose leadership or civic
participation criteria on us, but reality is telling us that they are a
failure, that we need a more comprehensive vision.
Results don't lie. And we now have results. We began working with a few
organizations, and are now working with a whole set of them, 25 so far. We
firmly believe in the concept of "critical mass." We need a minimum
group of transformed people to be able to change things. A small group will be
enough, as long as it is made up of people freed up and willing to do big
things. That's what we're banking on.
Psychologist Martha Cabrera, who heads
a team that has been working on
the personal reconstruction of communities all over Nicaragua,
shared her experience and views in this transcribed talk with envío.
Tips:
- For a
variety of reasons, including the quick succession of dramatic and
traumatic events in Nicaragua, people have been unable to work through
their experiences.
- Men
and women have been taught to express their emotions differently. Women
are allowed to express guilt, but not rage, while men are allowed anger,
even violence, but never fear, guilt or sadness, and they can never cry.
- It
is often said that people don't want to change, aren't interested in the
project, don't want to develop. But it is seldom asked why people feel
that way.
- Many
people from both the Sandinista band and the anti-Sandinista band still
have a lot of difficulty accepting the errors committed, expressing these
problems, reflecting on them.
- Multiplly
wounded societies run the risk of becoming societies with
inter-generational traumas. It is virtually a law that one treats others
the way one treats oneself.
- When
people begin to talk about their history, assume it and reflect on it, a
fundamental process takes place: people find meaning and significance in
what they have lived through.
- International
aid projects impose leadership or civic participation criteria on us, but
reality is telling us that they are a failure, that we need a more
comprehensive vision.
