Do the displaced people see any possibility of returning to their home villages?
Those who do go home are often confronted by the trauma that caused them to flee in the first place. In a town called Saiza, the villagers returned four years after a massacre. They found that the place had been reclaimed by the jungle. It took months to make the village habitable enough to start rebuilding what used to be there. And even after years of renewed communal existence with former neighbors, there is no real evidence of the emergence of any genuine social structures. What can MSF do in these places? The presence of MSF helps create a positive sense of security. We are often told that people feel they get the support and the attention that they need when the MSF teams are around. In individual and group therapy sessions, we work with those affected to uncover the causes of their problems; our primary focus, however, is on finding solutions and new perspectives for the future. Sometimes it is enough just to create a space in which someone can unburden themselves through talkin
