MCC and trauma healing after the tsunami

In the weeks following the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami, as MCC workers and partners reported a tremendous need to help people face devastating losses, MCC tapped into its years of experience in trauma healing work..

By mid-January 2005, in addition to funding relief efforts and supplies, MCC had committed to sending trauma healing trainers to Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka.

In late January, Karl and Evelyn Bartsch arrived in Indonesia to train nurses, teachers, relief workers, students and others in trauma healing techniques. In the 1990s the Bartsches had served with MCC in South Africa, training counselors to work with victims of Apartheid-era violence. They also worked with MCC in Uganda in 2006, training caregivers in stress and trauma healing. Karl Bartsch has done trauma healing work with Mennonite pastors in Colombia.

After the tsunami, MCC provided funding to translate into Indonesian an influential manual the Bartsches wrote in South Africa on trauma counseling training in cross-cultural settings and to adapt it for use in a Muslim context. The manual has also been translated into Zulu, French and Spanish.

As the Bartsches worked in Indonesia, psychotherapist Carolyn Heggen traveled to India and Sri Lanka, conducting trainings in locations including India’s Andaman Islands. Heggen had worked with MCC in Nepal to train schoolteachers and trauma counselors to work with victims of war. Since 2005, she has made several followup visits to the Andaman Islands to continue her collaboration with West Bengal Voluntary Health Association, a long-standing MCC partner organization that continues trauma healing work.

In addition to tsunami-affected areas, MCC continues to fund trauma healing work in regions affected by natural disaster and in locations such as Colombia and Sudan where communities have been torn by violence and conflict.