Romania trauma reflections

During my time here in Romania, I've been delivering the 360Life training to a group of staff and volunteers who are all involved in prison ministry in various different penitentiaries across the country. At one point we were even joined by the director of education for all of Romanian prisons, as the authorities have identified trauma as the biggest issue that needs to be addressed in the prisons. Apparently she was very impressed with the training (phew), and hopefully it has helped open thoughts on how the prison system can best address the issue of trauma in a way that helps those who so much need support to overcome all sorts of traumatic past experiences. Here follows just some of the issues that have come up in the discussions with participants of the 360Life trauma-informed training here in Romania. It’s been a fascinating, and intense time here, but what a privilege to be able to speak into the lives of this wonderful group of people.

NB: the following is in no particular order.

-            Post communist issues between the generations: parents bottled everything up cos couldn’t complain about anything. Now still find it hard to express emotions, or talk about how they are feeling. And equally find it hard to provide emotional support for children, which the younger generation find hard to cope with as lacking the role models for them to draw on as they become parents of the next generation.

-            Lack of trust by older generation, as never knew who was an informant for the communists, so still find it hard to trust, and again this overflows into not talking about things. Knock on issues for children who have never been taught how to trust, and so also find it hard to put into practice.

-            Being a Christian in communist country – lots of persecution: bullying (peers, work colleagues, teachers), denial of privileges afforded to non-Christian kids (at school and at work), not allowed to preach so if churches expanded then in trouble, trouble if caught with a Bible etc.

-            Lack of understanding about the concept of trauma, as so many of the hardships in communist times, that we might now say were types of trauma, at the time were considered just ‘how life was’. This included lots of fawning and appeasing just to keep the authorities happy, poverty, standing in line for food due to scarcity in the shops, as well as others already mentioned.

-            Post communist period: latch-key kids: parents at work from 6am – 6pm, so only saw the kids in the evenings. Those who were the kids left at home remember crying as the parents went out in the mornings, and they had to sort themselves for school etc. Trauma of abandonment.

-            Trauma of not being able to talk to their parents about things, the emotional neglect as parents found it so hard to process or show emotion

-            links between Romania as a nation having big T trauma of being under communism, and individuals having complex PTSD from million tiny paper cuts of personal life under communism;

-            Transgenerational traumas of various types due to the impact of communism on previous generations, and how they then pass on those traumatic ways of living and behaving to their children. Cycle slowly being broken as younger generation are turning to Europe and USA for videos, podcasts, books etc that show an alternative way of living life, and being more engaged with emotions etc. But there is still the struggle of not being able to discuss with own parents, and feeling a disconnect that many find it hard to overcome.

-            Traumas relating to the Romanian orphanages – both the traumas experienced by some of being in them, and the trauma of abandonment and neglect by family members resulting in social orphans. Those who were orphans at the time of the fall of Communism are now young adults, and still are experiencing post-traumatic issues.

-            Also due to abandonment – lots of children ended up in gangs, which are very dominant in some parts of Romania now, and leading to much crime of various types.

This list isn’t exhaustive, but gives insight into some of the issues that Romania is struggling with as they journey forwards.

all the delegates, looking extra smart in the presence of the government official (front row, 2nd from left)

 

Moldovan trauma

 My visit to Moldova has been brief, but what a wonderful visit it has been. From a few touristy wanderings, to church in an ex-KGB building, to delivering a workshop on secondary trauma, burnout and self-care to some incredible Christian women who are involved in ministries supporting abandoned children and single mothers. I have also had the privilege to chat with some women one-on-one about their reflections on trauma from a Moldavian context, and it is some of these insights that I share here.

The main headline is that all the references to trauma from a Moldova perspective can be traced back to their recent history related to the fall of the Soviet Union. This is not particularly surprising, considering how massive that was, but it was interesting to hear all the same, especially as some of the women I chatted with had not even been born when Moldova gained independence.

There is a very clear divide between the older pre-independence generation and the younger post-independence generation. The older generation remember how they were expected to be grateful for everything, even for just one type of ice-cream, and not wonder if there were any other options. An outworking of this nowadays is the tension between this accepting attitude of the older generation and that of the younger generation who are used to having so much more choice, and appear not to be grateful for the simple things. They also remember how they were instructed to question nothing, and grew up being instructed that Communism was the best and that everyone was rich and safe and provided for. The trauma of discovering that this was not the case when the Soviet fell, resulted in subsequent floundering and difficulty in trusting others as all of the building blocks on which their lives, ways of thinking, and views of the world had been created, crumbled before them. They grew up having to hide any troubles from the outside world, and as a result there is a lot of bottled up trauma in this generation that has never been worked out, or talked about. This shows up in a lot of alcoholism across the country (apparently Moldova has one of the highest rates for alcoholism per capita in the world).

According to the younger women that I chatted with, they recognise these struggles in their elders, and they try to be sympathetic to them, but clearly there are tensions at times. Several spoke about difficult times growing up as children, when their parents were more newly navigating life in a recently independent country that hadn’t really worked out its identity, and as a result there were several citings of the unresolved trauma of being raised by angry, unpredictable parents who didn’t know how to show love.

Please know that this was not the case for all, but they were recurring themes that I heard, both from personal testimony and from anecdotes that they shared of the experiences of others.

Following independence, financial hardship was significant, and many parents went overseas to try and find work in order to send money home. Apparently this was particularly so amongst women, whereby they went to Germany, Italy etc to seek work, and left the children at home with the father or wider family. Sadly there were many occasions when the father or wider family didn’t have the ability to care for the children, and as a result they were abandoned to orphanages as ‘social orphans’. So there are many young adults who grew up in institutional care and still bear the trauma of abandonment and neglect in their formative years.

Meanwhile, the men, who lost their jobs when the Soviet fell, struggled to find work due to few or no qualifications, and turned to drink, living off the money sent home by their wives. And the wives kept on working overseas, unaware of what was going on at home, and when eventually they did return home, it was not to the family situation that they had left, or expected to return to. So tough, so tough. Behind it all can be seen a desire to do the best for the family, and a demonstration of sacrificial love, but sadly it all turned out to be so different for so many. Yes, for some it worked out, but for the majority apparently it definitely didn’t.

A big cause of trauma in Moldova, especially for the children, is cited as being abandonment and neglect. These tie in with the many children who felt abandoned by their mothers when they went abroad to work, and then were often neglected by fathers who were struggling with their own issues as mentioned above, and by wider family who didn’t have the financial or emotional capacity to take in another child. So the child resorted to living on the streets, or got taken in by an orphanage as a ‘social orphan’ where various abuses and further neglect was rife. Many children born to single mothers living in the villages were also sent to orphanages, as the stigma against being a single mother was so strong that the girl was often abandoned by her family and had no means of providing for the child. As Moldova pursues membership of the EU, the number of orphanages has now fallen dramatically, and children are being fostered instead. But many children don’t have legal documents and so don’t officially exist - another form of trauma.

Alongside these traumas, the country still struggles with its identity - does it identify more with Romania or Russia in its allegiance? The national language is Romanian, but there are also many Russian speakers, and the attitude to the war in Ukraine is also divided. As a country that has had an identity of servitude to a superior empire or nation, it is still working out the reality of not having that identity anymore.

There is much more that I could share about trauma from a Moldovan woman’s perspective, but I will stop here. I hope that this gives you an insight into some of the issues that this beautiful country is wrestling with. They sound a lot, but there is hope – hope in their female president who is bringing about great change, and hope in the younger generation who want to pursue positive change within this country.

 

After 24 hours in Chisinau

This is my first time in Moldova, and I’m staying in Chisinau, visiting a missionary friend who is based here and in Ukraine for a charity that focuses on projects for children who are victims of war. More on that another time maybe, but for now I thought I’d just share a few reflections based on my first 24 hours here.

From an architectural perspective, there are throw-backs to the communist era which reminded me of some of the other ex-communist cities I’ve visited: old, identical, somewhat crumbling blocks of flats; very big government buildings with a square in front; rows of shopfront buildings (very little evidence of any of the usual global brands though); communal parks. The visible churches are predominantly orthodox, and very ornate and gilded inside they are too.

Talking of churches, the one I went to this morning was a wonderful charismatic church – lots going on, with community outreach, children’s work, and lots of young adults. They’ve recently opened a coffee shop on site, with the strap-line ‘making community, one coffee at a time’. And a fab extra bit of info is that the building that they have bought for their church is an ex-KGB building that was designed and used for spreading communist propaganda. How beautiful is that – a building built to spread the darkness of communism has been repurposed and is now spreading the light of Christianity, what a wonderful outcome!

The parks are very well sorted with activities for all ages – play parks, multiple basketball pitches, table-tennis tables, adult outdoor gyms etc – I guess given how many live in apartments, these parks are the garden for many residents. They are also great places for going for an early morning run, as I found out today!

And like any city that has reliable warm weather for a good part of the year, there are lots of outdoor eating spaces as well, and some very delicious-looking street food options (sadly not so many that are gluten-free, so I’ve had to skip trying them).

The languages spoken here are both Romanian and Russian. It seems that the older generation are more towards Russian speaking, whilst the younger generation are more towards Romanian. Indeed, at church today, a Russian speaker was speaking from the front, and so older people were translating from Russian into Romanian so that the younger ones could understand. The younger generation also seem to have a better command of English, and so at one point there was a 3-way translation going on around me: from Russian to Romanian to English, and very grateful I am for that.

From what I’ve picked up there are a mix of attitudes towards the situation regarding Ukraine and the war. Some Moldovans support Ukraine whilst others prefer Russian. Again there appears to be a bit of a generational angle to this. The older generation remember being part of the USSR, and some of the perceived benefits of that time: accommodation, job for life…. That, plus the fact that Ukraine gained some land that was previously Moldovan, leads to an anti-Ukraine tendency against their larger northern neighbour. Others recognise that if Ukraine falls, Moldova will become very vulnerable, and so have a more pro-Ukraine stance.

All these reflections are just based on my first 24hours here in Chişinău. In summary it has a fairly standard post-communist European small city feel, albeit from about 15-20 years ago. But out in the villages, from what I hear there is more poverty, and the communities are less developed, and more run down. But this is just what I hear, not what I’ve seen. It’s a joy to be here, and to be welcomed by these lovely people. 

 

 

 

When the world prefers coffee to tea

 

One of the places that I visit every time I come to Uganda is the vocational college set up by John Nj which is situated in rural Mityana, about 2 hour drive northwest(ish) from Kampala.

The area is renowned for its tea plantations, and once you leave the tarmac road and enter the properly rural area, the fields on either side are a vibrant green as far as the eye can see, full of tea bushes, and interspersed with groves of trees, often eucalyptus as they grow quickly to keep providing the fuel for the drying machines in the factories.

Tea workers will be seen in the fields, clipping the leaves and throwing them into the big baskets that they wear on their backs as fast as they can – they are paid by the basket load, so the more they pick, the more they earn. And every now and then there is a factory and workers houses. It’s mainly just the drying and sorting stages of the process that are done in Uganda, so the factory isn’t huge. And the workers ‘cottages’ are very basic, not even running water or electricity for most, but all are situated together in a sort of little community, with a borehole nearby.

The lack of production process that occurs in Uganda has an impact on the amount of money that Uganda makes from tea exports. There isn’t a lot of mark up on the basic tealeaves – that is made by the big brands when they do the final stages of the process. So it’s not the most lucrative of incomes, but it has been present for many years, and it has always seemed to be a given part of Uganda’s export economy.

But, in the past couple of years, I’ve noticed that the amount of land that was once given to tea is reducing. Where once it was all tea bushes, now there are swathes of it that have been dug up and are being rented out to farmers to grow other cash crops – maize seems to be particularly popular. Trees are also being chopped down and not replaced. I asked John about this, and he said that the tea companies are struggling to sell their tea as the market seems to have shrunk, and so in order to pay their workers, they have had to rent out some of their land to diversify their income stream.

Some of the workers cottages have also been left to disintegrate, as the number of workers that the tea companies need has reduced, and I came across one little area that felt so sad and abandoned with only a couple of homes that still seemed to have anyone living in them.

We wondered about the background to the shrinking of the market, and what might be causing it. I reflected on the massive increase in coffee shops that can be found in UK high streets, and the upsurge in the coffee culture generally. In Thornbury alone there are at least 10 such places, and that’s not a very big town. Presumably this is being accompanied by a decrease in the number of cups of tea being drunk (although I do have a few family members who are doing their best to keep the industry afloat between them!!!!).

There will still be some parts of the world where tea wins against coffee – but I suspect those countries grow their own tea so don’t need to import from Uganda. Certainly, Uganda has its own share of tea drinkers, and so some of its tea is for home use. But here also the coffee shop culture is growing, and the middle classes are often preferring the draw of a flat white or a latte to the traditional African tea. As I walk through the plantations and note the increased ratio of maize to tea within the tea plantation boundaries, it brings home to me the impact that the growth in coffee culture is having on the lives of individuals hundreds of miles away, most of whom can only dream of ever having enough money to be able to afford the luxury of  a ‘double-shot vanilla latte with oat’ or whatever your preferred cuppa happens to be.

This field used to be all tea, now the maize is winning!

 

 

 

lots of derelict homes in the tea-workers residential area

the hillside used to be covered in trees to fuel the factory - not any more

Reunited after 10 years.

 

I first started coming to Acholi Quarters in Uganda back in 2012, when I led teams of young people from UK schools to come and deliver educational activity weeks for the children living in the informal settlement.

One of the first children I really remember from those days was a young lad called Innocent. He must have been about 5 years old. He was so enthusiastic, always one of the first to arrive, and had this most wonderful big grin. He was great, and in time I was able to help him with going to mainstream school by funding his school fees.

I also met his mother and his older brothers – they were a family who ‘muddled by’. There was no father on the scene, and the mother had a troubled past which overflowed into how she coped with life in the present.

Then on one visit to Acholi Quarters, I was told that the mum had decided to go back to ‘the village’ with the boys and live there rather than in the city. Going back to the village basically means going back to the place that the parents think of as their ancestral home – it might be where they grew up before coming to the city, or where their parents grew up. For women it is usually where the husband’s family are from, as the location of ‘home’ moves from the village of her birth to the village of her husband’s birth when she takes the marriage vows.

Anyway, Innocent and his brothers were taken by his mum to the village, and contact with this lovely cheeky chappy was lost.

Until this visit!

The first place that I went to on arriving in Uganda this time, as with most visits, was the Nkuru Vocational college campus. This is the place that John Njendahayo has built, and that I’ve been involved in from the get go, along with incredible support and finance from some wonderful UK donors. I love going to the college – it’s so quiet, with beautiful views across tea plantations and rolling hills. Great for walking, for running, for sitting and watching the birds fussing in the trees and bushes.

So, I arrived there on Thursday and had a lovely afternoon catching up with John. And then, to my great delight, I was introduced to Innocent – now a strapping and very tall 18 yr old, who is a student at the college, thanks to being the recipient of an Acholi bursary.

It turns out that Innocent returned to Acholi late last year, having finished with school, and after the death of his mum. He didn’t want to stay in the village, as he thought that there might be better opportunities in Kampala. He saved the money to get back to Acholi, was taken in by one of Harriet’s group of mothers, and then was encouraged to put his name forwards for a bursary, which he was given.

And now he is at the college, learning to do construction, and loving it. It was so lovely to meet him again, and as he gets used to me being around, he is slowly opening up a bit more and filling me in on some of the extra aspects of the past 8 years. I feel so honoured to be back in his life again, and to be entrusted with parts of his life that he normally holds close to his chest. It just goes to show that you never know quite how a story will end!

Innocent in 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Innocent in 2025

 

Antigua reflection: Completing the trade triangle

 

Have been on a treat of a holiday with Tim recently; we went to the Caribbean and whilst there spent a week on the island of Antigua. It was a great week – sun, sand, sea, snorkelling, and relaxing, and we felt really blessed to be there. The Antiguans are very welcoming and friendly, and wherever we went there was good banter, and chat, and a really upbeat vibe.

For me, one very poignant aspect of the week was when we were on a booked excursion and had lunch at a place called Betty’s Hope memorial park. Betty’s Hope is an old sugar plantation and it turns out that the plantation leaseholders were, for the majority of the time that it was under British ownership, the Codrington family. This family have their ancestral home in and around the village of Codrington which is about 12 – 15 miles from our home town of Thornbury.

The information boards at the plantation gave a lot of insight into the day to day of the plantation, including the number of slaves who did all of the manual labour, and the conditions in which they lived and worked. The products from the plantation were sugar and rum, much of which was sold on the European market, and entered it via Bristol, which was one of the two main entry ports for products coming from the Caribbean and the Americas. As a result, a lot of the wealth of the Codrington family was made from the income generated by the sugar and rum that was produced from there.

Earlier this year I was in Ghana, and stood in the tunnel in Jamestown where abducted Africans stood in shackles ahead of being herded onto over-crowded slave ships, never to see their homeland again. With these memories so recent for me, it felt extra poignant, that just a few later I was standing on an ex-plantation that was served by slaves from Western Africa (did any of them come from Ghana via the tunnel at Jamestown), and that funded the fortunes of a family just near home. Returning home to Bristol and Codrington area was the completion of a journey into the trading triangle of so long ago – may I be a better person for the insights and reflections gained along the way.