By Serey Samchet | Director Ragamuffin Cambodia / Arts Therapist
“Lotus”
Ragamuffin Cambodia ‘Be Yourself’ Arts Therapy Service for Vulnerable Young Women
‘Be yourself’ project was established in 2012 as the fist Cambodian led Arts Therapy Project within Ragamuffin Cambodia. The aim of this project is to bring healing, nurturing, honoring, and celebrating the personal capacity, uniqueness, and self-care. The project is committed to providing a creative healing process for individuals and groups of young people and adults who have suffered from trauma and psychological challenges, in order to discover their essence of self, connectedness, growth, and to lead a good quality of life and relationships. Our project strongly believes in the power of self-connectedness that allows the young people to be themselves, to transform and celebrate their life, and other people. So far, our work in Cambodia, we have been working with many young people who have been suffering with psychological and physical trauma, attachment issue, chronic disease, poverty, suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety, and other types of abuse. Through out our work, we have learnt that there have been a significance lack of mental, spiritual and physical health care and support that caused by social stigma, domestic violence, and poverty in their communities. As a result, they found themselves very disempowered, worthless, and invisible in society.
It is changing times in Cambodia as there is a gradual move from residential care structures to community led initiatives for children and young people. Transitions are complex and have revealed a fundamental need for psychological support and creative approaches to building resillience. The Therapy team have been working with young women in such transition through the provision of individual and group arts therapy sessions. As a result of these sessions the team have been designing a training programme in order to provide a more intensive programme of support. The team have been engaged in intial sessions with individuals, assessment and liasion with local NGO's and curriculum design to enable the launch of the next phase.
For this new group, our project aims to provide the opportunity to 30 young women to receive in depth therapeutic care and support in collaboration with local NGO's in Cambodia for recruiting and referring clients.
Project: ‘Lotus’ A 12 week therapeutic course to empower young vulnerable women in Cambodia.
Aims: This project aims to redeem and develop their inner strength, discover positive resources for life, and build relationships to achieve the following:
The reasons why this training will be an important transition for the girls because most of girls we have been working with have been through so much difficulties in their lives such as abandonment since childhood, discrimination, bullying, sexual abused, health issue, and complex attachment problem. All these problems have result both social and self-stigma in their life and have impacted in varies ways on both inter and intra personal relationship, well-being, self- esteem, confident, and quality of life. For example, some of girls were unable to take on or do well in their vocational training or at school though they were given the opportunity to be on the course due to issue of low self esteem and low-confident to learn or take on new things. Most of them have continued to lead their lives vulnerably or fail to achieve their goal after leaving their NGOs.
Throughout this special program, we do hope that it will give them the opportunity to bring remarkable changes into their life by helping them to discover their strengths, empower themselves, to bring more self awareness, to better nurture their lives, restore self-confidence, and redeem from their emotional wound that enable them to pass their support toward others. We believe that “when a person can find light within herself, she will be stronger and more resillient. Then they can also become the light for others or can help other people to find their light and hope too”.
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