Fall / Winter 2006
STAR Spreads Healing
Boarding school principal Gladys Ayot Oyat journeyed 7,000 miles from Uganda to Harrisonburg, Va., last summer to gain the skills she needs to cope with more than 1,000 villagers who were taking shelter in her rural school each night. This was on top of the 600 girls enrolled in her school, many also the survivors of violence.
STAR is developing a youth program in response to many
requests from STAR alumni. STAR Youth Coordinator Vesna
Hart took the program to her native Croatia this past summer to
try it out with young people there. She is one of a dozen people
testing the program after a year of refinements in collaboration
with adults who work with youth.(Pictured above: New Orleans young people at STAR’s healing retreat.)
One test site was the Jesuit Retreat Center in Louisiana, where 16 youths originally from New Orleans experienced STAR. Funded by UNICEF, this session enabled many of the teenagers to return to their families (wherever they might be living) and to feel optimistic about working for a new future.
STAR intends to publish the youth program materials by the spring of 2007.
All were seeking protection from the nighttime killing and kidnapping of the Lord’s Resistance Army. The phenomenon is called “night commuting.” [See related story on Uganda's cease-fire.]
Oyat’s own four children have been living far from her for their own safety, and her husband no longer can work as a veterinarian – most of the animals have been killed. He works away for weeks at a time as an armed peacekeeper.
“I’ve attended so many funerals,” she said during her visit to Virginia. Another participant understood this well. He had lost every single member of his family in the mid-1990s genocide in Rwanda.
Hearing stories like these among her classmates, Jennie Amison of Harrisonburg said Strategies in Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) “gave me a sense of energy. It was amazing. I left feeling, ‘I’ve got work to do and I’m not done yet.’” Amison needs that can-do spirit – she directs a half-way house for men leaving Virginia’s prisons.
STAR is a unique approach to trauma awareness and healing that connects personal transformation with building healthy communities. STAR assists people in coping after traumatic events such as genocide, terrorism and natural disasters and, in many cases, enables them to assist others.
Religious and community leaders from more than 50 countries and 35 states have attended U.S.-based STAR seminars, usually at EMU. STAR training and programs have taken place in nine countries outside of North America.
Trainings at a Glance
STAR trainings in 2005-06 included:
■ A post-Katrina training for 10
community activists, social workers, and
school personnel, who were members of
Turning Point Partners in New Orleans.
The first order of business was “working
through our own trauma,” said Jean
Handley, who lost her home in the
hurricane. Afterwards many returned to
New Orleans to resume their support of
other hurricane survivors.
■ Training for 35 New Orleans pastors
and spouses under the auspices of
Churches Supporting Churches. This
was a strategy to assist African-American
congregations in 12 areas where
Hurricane Katrina wrecked their facilities.
■ Training for about 100 Sudanese at
three southern Sudanese sites – the first
for 42 clergy and civil society leaders
in Maridi, the second for 35 community
leaders in the Nuba Mountains. Both were
facilitated by part-time CJP professor
David Anderson Hooker, assisted in the
first case by CJP alums Babu Ayindo and
Tecla Wanjala. A third, follow-up training in
Maridi was conducted by CJP professor
Nancy Good Sider and Ayindo. Sponsors
were the World Council of Churches and
New Sudan Council of Churches (the first
and third trainings) and Danish Church
Aid (the second training).
■ A week-long training in El Salvador for persons from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.
■ Three years of trainings, beginning in’04, in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea (the
Mano River Union) in collaboration with
the national Christian and Inter-Religious
Councils of the three countries.
For more information on STAR,
visit www.emu.edu/STAR.