Port Blair, Jan. 18: A 14-year-old girl has stopped talking at the Nirmala school relief camp. On December 26, she watched helplessly as the relentless waters swept away her classmate from her father?s desperate grip at Car Nicobar.
A woman who has lost everything ? her husband, her two-and-a-half-year-old child and her home ? has also lapsed into teary silence. Her misery was complete when relatives in Port Blair refused to take her in for lack of space.
The immediate danger of the tsunami may have receded, but the trauma it has left behind is deep. Psychologists and health professionals have been on the job, but the wounds could take years to heal.
A team from Nimhans, working in Port Blair camps, had attended to queues of patients and their problems with brief consultations, prescribing basic medication. But guilt has prevented many, like the grieving wife and mother, from taking them.
?It is called survival syndrome. Those who have lived blame themselves,? says Snigdha Gohain, a psychologist with Tender Minds, a division of the West Bengal Voluntary Health Association, who has been here for the past 10 days.
With a dearth of mental health professionals here, additional doctors are expected to arrive from the Centre.
Tender Minds is also training 156 volunteers to help deal with the problems. ?These people can?t wait for psychologists to arrive. They have to be given the basic skills to help themselves,? adds the counsellor. The Nimhans team also trained teachers to identify signs of trauma in children.
For the kids in the camps, the strategy is to keep them busy. At the ITF camp, where over 1,000 Nicobarese refugees are staying, the children have been given footballs and badminton sets. Children are being taken to museums and the local science centre.
?The counselling for the children is activity related, like singing and story-telling. They need diversion to help them open up,? Gohain adds.
The authorities at the Nirmala camp, run by the Roman Catholic Church, have put up a giant screen where films are shown. ?We try to show them happy movies, like Hum Saath Saath Hain and Munnabhai MBBS. There are also cultural activities and games,? says Father Johnson D?Cruz.
There are 113 children in this camp under the age of 15. ?We have been playing games like antakshari,? smiles Rini, who has lost her home. Sabita, her friend from Car Nicobar, says: ?I don?t want to go back home. We have fun here. The only problem is that we don?t get to bathe properly.?
The difference is stark on a visit to the School Line camp. Here, there are no classes and no activities. A few boys kick around a ball, others huddle around a TV. But with no sound, AXN is little more than empty images.
