By Inonge Siluka | Charity Director
Over the last quarter Restored Hope Zambia has focused on training the team to better support survivors and equip communities in preventing abuse and provide trauma informed care, updating current community resources whilst continuing to support survivors.
Supporting Survivors
Four survivors and one family member of a survivor reached out to the organisation for support during this period. Three were survivors of church abuse and two were relating to abuse in other contexts. The survivors were mainly looking for a listening ear, someone to talk to and an avenue to share their experiences without judgement.
What was striking about the cases was that although the abuse in all cases happened a long time ago, the wounds and hurt were raw and painful. This is often something that many communities don’t always have a full understanding of, as it relates to trauma and how it can impact survivors regardless of how long ago the abuse happened. Restored Hope Zambia is still supporting these survivors, providing an avenue for them to reclaim their own story and work on their own journey of healing.
As the organisation focuses on church abuse, the team has been working to refer the two non-church abuse cases to partner organisations after providing initial support and a listening ear to ensure the survivors were safe.
Mental Health, Trafficking & Trauma Training
The team participated in training via a Mental Health Summit through a partnership with Restored Hope Zambia UK (a Scottish charity) and trainers from two organisations - Survivors of Human Trafficking in Scotland and Positive Mental Health Scotland. The Summit covered workshops on Human Trafficking Awarenessto give an understanding of what human trafficking is, its scale and how to identify signs of it in the context of churches and how individuals can be vulnerable to exploitation in this setting.
The training also covered aspects of trauma with an emphasis on creating places of safety to enable trauma recovery. The training explored the consequences of traumatic experiences on a person’s physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being, and helped the team consider what kind therapeutic environment helps facilitate recovery. The final training was on Mental Health First Aid covering areas of suicide intervention, depression, anxiety and their symptoms and self harm as well as some tips on caring for your own mental health which the team appreciated.
Developing Resources
The team has been working on incorporating some of the learning from the above training sessions in our own resources and training materials for both community education workshops and law enforcement training, particularly on how to create places of safety for trauma recovery.
This has been done alongside survivor input to make our resources more accessible especially in communities where literacy levels are low. We are working on adding more visual illustrations to simplify our resources on defining and understanding abuse, adding new resources to further unpack its impact and how to be a place of safety. We are aiming to have this ready to distribute in our next community education workshops and we look forward to sharing more about that.
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By Chalwe Chikoka Banda | Project Coordinator
By Inonge Siluka | Charity Director
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