By Danjuma Attah, Gombe
A two day workshop aimed at reaching traumatized Internally Displaced Persons (IDP’s) of the Boko Haram crisis in the Northeast with palliative support has been held in Gombe.
The Africa Transitional Justice Legacy Fund (ATJLF) is funding the project which Kishimi Shelter and Care Foundation in collaboration with Psycare Health Right Foundation are implementing.
The programme targets the healing of no fewer than 1,000 traumatized victims of the insurgency who found themselves in Gombe State.
Our Correspondent reports that not much attention has been given to these category of victims during and after the over ten years Boko Haram crisis.
According to the Executive Director of Kishimi Shelter and Care Foundation, Mrs Grace Samuel, the current intervention is targeted at IDP’s in Gombe, Billiri and Yamaltu-Deba Local Government Areas of Gombe State. She added that a similar project was carried out in Kaltungo and Akko LGA’s of the State.
She said, major stakeholders such as community and religious leaders among many others were trained on how to detect, identify, and how to cope with signs of trauma.
“We worked together with these stakeholders, victims of the trauma (IDP’s) who already have structures at the Local Government and State levels. We made safe spaces for them to talk and share experiences, values, self esteem and the challenges of trauma”, Mrs. Grace stated.
John Benedict, Director of Psycare Health Right Foundation, also explained further that Gombe State has remained cardinal in the Northeast housing IDP’s from Boko Haram flashpoints of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa States.
He stated further that, “trauma follows every form of violence which most people don’t pay attention to. The objective of the programme is to provide palliative care to traumatized victims and to also provide some sort of services to the host communities.
“Trauma can come as a result of violence, rape, human rights violations of all sorts. We create safe spaces for these victims where they can come and discuss their issues as well as do counselling.
“We refer to the hospital those cases that degenerate to full blown psychiatric complications where psychiatric doctors work on them, they collect drugs free.
“In the previous exercise, we reached about 300 in various safe spaces including over 70 of those whose cases degenerated to psychological complications. Most of them have been restored to normalcy.
“Our objective in the current programme is to add up to the number we’ve had before. Taking these curative drugs is almost like a life time experience for most of them.
“80 persons are expected to benefit from this current medical intervention as we also want to reach 300 traumatized person in our various safe spaces in the three LGA’s. We hope to see beneficiaries reaching a thousand or more”, John Benedict explained.
