Self-Help Groups: Helping to Demonstrate the Power of Feelings and Finding a Shoulder on which to Cry!

After completing the first part of their formation for the accompanying of people in difficulty, the candidates indicated by their parishes (each of whom is known as a ‘CBPSF’) are called upon to choose and to support for eight months twenty family units which are identified according to two criteria of vulnerability: a daily income beneath the poverty threshold (two American dollars), on the one hand, and the presence of Ebola orphans within the family unit, on the other. Each of the CBPSF will follow twenty families out of a total of 400 family units. The Camillian Task Force (CTF) will take responsibility for them with economic support (a conditional cash transfer and other forms of help) and human support (individual and group accompanying).

The month of May witnessed the beginning of the experience of self-help groups. On different days – in order to foster the participation of the CTF team – in each parish the twenty families that were chosen are brought together in order to share the histories of their lives which are marked by poverty and the drama of Ebola. The task of a CBPSF is to accompany the group towards mutual support, learning the difficult art of directing the group. To sum up: while the CBPSF has an opportunity to test his abilities as a leader, the group is given the opportunity to break the wall of silence that accompanies the drama of lives which have been marked by very many sudden and rapid deaths – deaths which often have not had the possibility of a farewell. Frightening stories emerge, testimonies of mourning that is still young and anger that is controlled only with difficulty. This is an opportunity to share suffering which it is difficult to contain on one’s own, creating space for solidarity and new prospects.

     Differently to what one is led to believe, the drama of an unexpected, tragic and quick death also leaves deep marks in those who are used to struggling to survive: the pain of the soul is not the luxury of the few! Indeed, listening to these testimonies brings out the depths of this suffering. Tears, often held back out of respect and modesty, now flow spontaneously, finally allowing a space which provides an outlet for the person’s emotions. The solidarity that is specific to this people which is used to seeing itself as a wider family expresses itself in an emotional participation made up of little cries, sighs and marked emphases. Nobody manages to control themselves anymore and a fact that has just been described ceases to be an individual experience and becomes a collective drama. And to such an extent that quite often one has to stop describing events because they have the power to bring to mind the events that each person has gone through in his or her own life, and make them relive them. Mothers see again their dead children; children remember their mothers; and spouses are reminded of their partners. A tragedy that has often become silence now re-emerges! And with it the possibility of weeping so as to demonstrate the power of feelings, to find a shoulder on which to cry!

It is of imperative importance not to allow this cry not to be listened to, a cry which far too often – for example after the civil war – was only intuited without there being real action to provide support. The emphasis which by now all the agencies place on psycho-social initiatives must stop being a fashion or a new strategy for action and find practical implementation in nearness to those who have gone through mourning too much on their own. This is a challenge for the Camillian Task Force as well because this is silent work which it is difficult to quantify and which is far from the floodlights. Only when one manages to endure the face of a sixteen year old boy who has lost twenty-three relatives because of Ebola can one understand the human drama that a calamity leaves behind it. In addition to numbers, the epidemic takes the form of the faces and the names of bothers and sisters, towards whom we are pushed by our duty to help them on the arduous pathway of hope!