Sun, Jul 05, 2009
Courtesy of Marge Pellegrino
Jorgensen Brooks Group Counselor Sales and Marketing Everready Glass Sales Reps Health Care CENTRAL ARIZONA COLLEGE DIRECTOR OF HEALTH INFORMATION MANAGEMENT Finance and Accounting Charles E. Gillman Company Accounting Specialist Health Care Dependable Health Services Physical Therapists Health Care Sierra Tucson Eating Disorders Program Coordinator Construction West-Press Printing OpinionTorture victims find strengthArizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 06.15.2008
They came to Tucson from all over the world. The youngest is an infant. The oldest is 80.
They are refugees. Most have lost everything, including loved ones who were tortured and killed; many have themselves been tortured. All have been displaced and are building new lives here.
Here's a bit of good luck for these new Tucsonans: The Center for the Prevention and Resolution of Violence, a gentle-hearted program that brings them psychological and medical support and helps guide them through their lingering pain and trauma using expressive art.
"Most of our clients used to come up through the Sancturary Movement from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador," says the center's Marge Pellegrino."But the demographics have changed. Now our new clients are mostly coming from African nations — Somalia, Cameroon, Uganda, Mali — and from Iraq and Afghanistan."
It is, unfortunately, the way of the world. A bloody eruption of violence or repression will eventually subside in one part of the globe, leaving refugees, broken families, horrors never to be forgotten as new violence erupts elsewere. On its Web site, Amnesty International reports torture is being used in at least 81 countries and that 14.2 million people worldwide are refugees from their home countries.
Thousands of refugees have been resettled in Tucson. For instance, Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest has provided resettlement and adjustment help since 1982; it also provides legal support for those seeking asylum.
One of the center's roles is to coordinate health and psychological needs of refugees, especially torture victims, who are referred by resettlement groups.
"We get referrals from the resettlement agencies and we arrange for clients to get physical and psychological exams for asylum hearings using volunteer psychologists, doctors, medical students," Pellegrino said.
At present, the center is working with 217 refugees from 37 countries. The center, which has two part-time employees — Pellegrino and case manager Beverly Blashill Jutry — backed by scores of volunteers, is operated by the Hopi Foundation.
The center coordinates physical and emotional care for the refugees using volunteer doctors and counselors. "Clients get care from people experienced in treating trauma, torture, dislocation," Pellegrino said. "The medical students undergo training for this."
The needs of torture victims can be complex. Some clients also live with constant anxiety because they have family members who have been unable to escape tribal or ethnic or other violence in their home countries.
Pellegrino is director of the center's other program for refugees and torture victims, the Owl & Panther Project. It's named for a Cherokee legend in which an owl and panther stayed awake and alert for seven days and were given the power to see through darkness.
When it was founded in 1995, the Owl & Panther Project offered tutoring, but soon it expanded into activities to help clients heal through writing and sharing their experiences — and by helping other refugees. Owl & Panther young people volunteer as translators when refugees see a doctor, for instance.
The project's Web site says, "Children, young adults and parents ... like the owl and panther of Cherokee legend, stay watchful in their own darkness. As they begin to express their feelings through poetry, they discover their strength."
Pellegrino, a soft-voiced woman with salt-and-pepper hair and a perpetual gentle smile, has published three children's books. Her next one, "Journey of Dreams," about a family that flees a massacre in Guatamala, will be published in 2009 by Frances Lincoln, a London publishing house.
Most Owl & Panther clients are children and teens. During the school year, they gather weekly to do sand tray therapy, mime, yoga, drawing, sewing, dancing, drumming and writing collaborative and individual stories and poetry.
"There are always adults in the group, too — people who can't handle counseling but can be helped through expressive arts," Pellegrino said.
It sounds grim, in a way: Broken men, women and children searching for a way to heal themselves, but when you visit the center's tiny one-room office at 738 N. Fifth Ave., you're struck by all the laughter and color and light the program has generated. Children's colorful art is displayed everywhere — and so is their writing.
In 2006 the group published a collection of poetry, "Writing out of the Darkness: An Anthology of Poetry by Refugees in Transition" through the Tucson Writers Project.
Patricia Barceló, whose family fled political persecution and torture in Guatemala in 1985, wrote this:
"Talk to me about torture and malnutrition/remind me of death/this was all I knew."
Last year, working with the Columbia University Comic Book Project, Pellegrino's group produced a comic book, "The Owl & the Panther" and a 13-minute film about how the comic book was done.
In the film, the kids explain that they decided to tell the story of refugees in their comic "so others will understand." In putting together their first draft they began by listing "problems our families experienced and challenges other refugees face."
In the comic, the wise owl and panther guide and encourage refugee families through wars and other violence, the deprivation of life in crowded camps or behind bars and finally on to safe shores.
For the Owl & Panther Project this year, Pellegrino is looking for donors for a digital story-telling project. "We have Arizona Commission of Arts grants that will cover one instructor," she said, "But we need donors for laptops and digital cameras."
Energetic Pellegrino, who is arguably passionate about everything, undoubtedly will get it done because she is especially passionate about the power of expressive arts. The digital stories her Owl & Panther charges eventually tell will be strong, vigorous, victorious. Count on it. As she tells the children, "You are the boss of your words."
Contact Editorial writer Jane See White at jwhite@azstarnet.com or 573-4238.
|
|
2 Comments on this story