The problem:
A man smiles at the cameras in a courtroom, he has murdered his one small child and seriously injured the other one, The postmortem of the dead child tells of long term violent abuse such as, broken ribs, old burn marks, damaged finger nails and a cracked skull. The man insisted throughout that he was innocent and even after his "Life" sentence by the judge, smiled at the cameras as he was led down the courtroom prison cell A psychologist's report revealed that the man was abused as a child by his violent stepfather.
This is an just an allegory based on several instances of child abuse in our country.
The South African Police estimate that a woman is raped every 36 seconds and one trade union estimates that a child is raped every 3 minutes. www.ngopulse/article/abusedchildren
One in 3 children reported sexual abuse by their 17th birthday. https://africacheck.org/reports/levels-childrensexualabuse-evenhigher-activist-claimed
As you can see, this is a very serious issue, as many young damaged lives' can turn into dysfunctional adulthoods!
To give you an idea, the disfigured tree was damaged when it was small and now the perfect boundary line of trees are spoiled by a huge gap. Just so it is with a traumatized child when they become an adult, as they simply cannot fit in!
A part of the solution:
To return to the roots and to start afresh. The Papillon Foundation was declared as the patron of the Non Profit, "Apples of Gold South Africa", as we partnered to offer free, accredited "Trauma Training" to child workers!
The project was started in late 2015 and the focus initially was to empower child workers with the skills to detect trauma in small children and how to manage and treat traumatized little souls.
Papillon managed to obtain a funder for the basic operational costs of the project, but I am afraid that we did not expect the demand, not only in South Africa, but also in other developing countries.
To date 700 child workers have graduated from the free Trauma Training project. It would be difficult to calculate how many children each child worker could help to heal during their careers, but save it to say that hundreds of little lives could be saved.
Here is one of the early groups of child workers during a break in training at the Papillon Development Center.
Another glimpse of the group at work during trauma training.
This is a group being trained in Alberton, a town in Ekhuruleni, of South Africa.
Here we had a group in the city of Cape Town, South Africa.
Here is a little group in Xai-Xai, Mozambique
And this is a group of South African Police Reservists that deals with traumatic situations.
Free trauma training courses were thus far offered in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Vereeniging, Roodepoort, Cape Town, Pietermaritzburg, Hermanus, Port Elizabeth, Namibia, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Equador!
The problem is of course, as usual, a lack finances!
The idea is to go about wherever we are sent to offer the trauma training courses and to identify 2 or 3 stars in the classes that are suitable to be trained as trainers, so that they can continue with the work.
People can then say that they did it by themselves and not only will the children benefit, but we will also create community ownership of the trauma training efforts!
We cannot overemphasize the importance of this project to renew the generations and trauma training for youth and adults are also in the pipeline!
Note: The photos were sent to me from the trauma training classes.
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