SUMMARY OF 2008
Music for Peaceful Minds
Music Therapy for Children Traumatised By the Rebel War in North Uganda | In Association with: SOS Children’s Villages Supported By: Anglia Ruskin University Music Therapy Dept. Spanish Association of Music Therapists. Trust Greenbelt. St Andrew’s Street Baptist Church, Cambridge |
Music for Peaceful Minds has been in existence since May 2008. It set out to make music therapy services available to children who have been traumatised by the rebel war in northern Uganda. A Music Therapist and I went to northern Uganda to set up group music therapy work with children at SOS Children’s Village, Gulu. There we led eight music therapy groups, each lasting ten weeks, reaching a total of 50 children.
Whilst there, we networked and found a boarding school for war-affected children (“Laroo Boarding School”) where we began running music therapy groups with six groups over a 10 week period offering therapy to a total of 32 children.
Consequently, we found that the carers and teachers at these institutions were keen to learn new skills to help them work with their clients/children so we trained the ‘mothers’ (primary care-givers) at SOS Children’s Village, student-leaders at a boarding school for war-affected children (“Hope North”), counsellors at the Caritas counselling centre and a Dr with the Joint Clinical Research Centre (JCRC). Later this year we will also run a training course for the Ugandan workers who run War Child Holland’s psycho-social programmes for children and child mothers. We have been collaborating with War Child Holland to develop a music therapy programme to add to their existing psycho-social programme.
The final project we started was to run class music sessions for children with special needs in a unit at a mainstream school called “Prison Primary”. This project is expanding to include smaller group music therapy sessions for those children who are more severely disabled.
We have distributed over ten ‘adung’s (African harps), three xylophones, nearly 20 African drums and a variety of smaller instruments to three institutions in and around Gulu. These institutions were so grateful for the instruments, since they realise how important – and therapeutic – music can be.
The last thing I did before coming home for Christmas was to hire a Ugandan teacher, Acen Betty, who has an avid interest in counselling and enjoys music. We had a brief introductory training session for her before she starts her three month intensive training with Jantina, the Dutch Music Therapist volunteer who is staying in Gulu. We are resting our hopes on her to continue the work in Gulu with supervision from the UK.
2009 ONWARDS
Jantina or I will be making trips as necessary throughout the following years to make sure that Music for Peaceful Minds’ continues to help children to reintegrate and resume a normal life and move on from their past. In the meantime:
January 2009 | Jantina trains Betty in Gulu |
February 2009 | Bethan visits Gulu to run a training course for War Child Holland, the SOS mothers and student-leaders at Hope North boarding school. Training continues with Betty. |
March 2009 | Jantina trains Betty in Gulu, passing over control to her gradually. |
April – December 2009 | Betty runs ‘MPM’ in Gulu with telephone supervision from Bethan and visits for training when necessary. |
2009
Bethan, her husband Gareth and MPM volunteer Music Therapist Chia-Ling Ho visited Acen Betty in Gulu to offer supervision and further training. Chia-Ling stayed two months and worked alongside Betty doing peer supervision and offering professional support. Bethan and Gareth then visited Kitgum, 100km north of Gulu, and offered MPM services to a special needs school “North Ugandan Community Based Action for Children with Disabilitiies” (memorably called “NUCBACD!”) and a counselling centre called “Straight Talk” offering self-referral of teenagers for various forms of psychological and medical counselling. They were interested in having MPM work with them and we suggested a training course later in the year.
Bethan went with Betty to start a new program at “Cubu” school, some miles out of the town, and services were stopped at SOS Children’s Village because it was agreed that all the children had benefitted and Betty’s time could be better spent in other schools. Links will be kept with SOS and MPM so that holiday music programs may be introduced at later dates.
2010
Bethan was unable to go to Uganda in 2010 as she was pregnant. MPM’s original volunteer, Dutch Music Therapist Jantina Bijpost along with Spanish Music Therapist Neysa Navarro-Fernandez went together for three weeks to offer peer supervision and professional support to Betty and to run the planned training course at NUCBACD (see ‘2009’) and Straight Talk. The training course went so well with enthusiasm running high and a good turn-out for the course where lunch of beans and rice was provided by MPM. A set of musical instruments was donated by MPM to these places, handmade in Gulu by Ugandan musician Santos.
Jantina and Neysa evaluated various aspects of the project and found that it was still very beneficial to the children partaking in music counselling. A new program was started at a school unit for deaf children.
2011
Betty is finishing her Masters in Guidance Counselling with East African University, funded by MPM. Bethan will be visiting Betty and evaluating MPM’s work later this year, as she will be moving to Uganda in June to live in Kasese, western Uganda.
