34.7. This meant that many of the Byumba trainees had been of marriageable age when the war and genocide erupted and that the older people had had to carry responsibility for their families and existent social contacts while under threat. Those currently in their twenties were, in those days, children aged seven, eight or nine. Something similar was true in 2008 for the trainees in Nyamata and in 2007 for those in Nya-Ngezi. In the Liberia of 2013 the train- ees had come of age between their thirteenth and twenty-seventh year in a constant atmosphere of poverty, chaos and life-threatening violence. With this information in mind, I looked in my sociotherapy toolbox for pertinent training material that related to trainees’ circumstance. I assumed that there would be a time for further questions and answers at a later stage of the train- ing. Questions about the status of marital relations, for instance, or changes in social position due to a partner’s absence (through death or years of exile or captivity).
The trainees’ answers about children gave me a clear picture of what I would have to reckon with. With exercises and, especially, games, I could teach the trainees ways of talking about how children contribute to the quality of life. Topics could be the daily worries on the part of (adoptive) parents, guardians, primary-school teachers and officials in functions with responsibility for or- phans. What is it like, in everyday practice, to teach groups of children many of whom live with their parents and so many do not? Are there any examples worth following? My idea was that such organised contact opportunities as were part of the training and later of the sociotherapy groups would be useful to both the trainees themselves and to the process of learning to supervise sociotherapy groups.
Within the scope of the brief training, answers about loss referred to ques- tions that could not be asked. The responses confirmed me in my assumption that caution would have to be exercised and that skilfully formulated ques- tions contribute to a growth of mutual trust. ‘Skilful’ here denotes the art and expertise of making the trainees’ background shape the format and content of the training: the acts of violence and present worries, fear, suspicion, si- lence, shame and feelings of guilt and/or survivor guilt can and must not be ignored. Any interventions should be experienced by the trainees as material from which they can learn.
The responses concerning place of residence confirmed me in my expecta- tion that the training area did not constitute the trainees’ entire world and that my questions, arguments and answers must not be restricted to just that
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area. With this information I could make efficient use of the available train- ing time and avoid possible misunderstandings. On the subject of moving house, I could now ask questions about the function of the current place of residence in processing events from the past. Did the trainees attend the community justice courts in their current place of residence, as was man- datory? Or did they, as the exploratory talks made clear, travel to the place where their case was discussed? And if so, did they have the bus fare? In this way I could already turn my thoughts to artistic-educational exercises whose theme was integration.
What I could ask was how people had acted, sought, comforted, cared and encouraged each other in the past years. Using their responses I could work out how these efforts were appreciated, what had gone well and what should not be repeated. I could ask how the current patterns of social relationship had come about and whether there was room for pushing social frontiers, and what people drew hope from for the next day.
That 65.3% of the 78 trainees from Byumba, Nya-Ngezi and Nyamata had paid jobs meant that the recruitment criteria had been applied. And I now knew that there were trainees without paid work and that this could carry the risk of them pulling out as soon as they found work. That is why I found it very important to create a motivating perspective. A carefully developed and motivating long-term perspective is of the essence in a wounded society where trust takes years to build, seconds to break and forever to fix. I was considering having the trainees themselves organise a presentation for the local population about their experiences with sociotherapy in use.
The advantage that the trainees with an academic or a higher-education- al level had gave the training a broad, across-the-board orientation. What raised questions with me was that a considerable number of trainees had par- ticipated in quite a few training programmes organised by a range of NGOs (in trauma counselling, HIV prevention, conflict management, human rights and good governance, prevention of sexual violence against women, gender, care to child-soldiers). Did broad social impact fail to occur because the con- tent of this array of training programmes was not complementary and thus brought about a veritable tower of Babel? And yet, the Byumba Anglican church authorities hoped to see renewed cohesion in the social fabric. Working in multidisciplinary teams had taught me that assembling a number of thinking models in itself has no added value. Those for whom these models and interventions are intended can only integrate the various interventions
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