ACT International is now in the midst of some exciting new projects and planning for new training activity in the Autumn. On 1st July our child trauma centre opened in Gaza City, run by Mohammed El Sharef and Haitham Shamiah.  They have received updated CATT training in Arabic via skype from Dr Ghalia Al Asha in Jordan, and have now begun to treat children and young people who have suffered in the ongoing conflict at the border.  News of the service is getting around and their list of referrals is growing. They are being supported on a day-to-day basis by job-share project managers Coco Burch and Tamara Curtis. This pilot project is being jointly funded and managed in partnership with Firefly International and IMET2000, as these are organisations with experience of funding and running services on the ground in Palestine. After a month up-and-running, all seems to be going very well! 

In November we are delivering CATT training in Yerevan, Armenia, and thanks to the efforts of Rosemarie Ghazaros, this trip is now fully funded! Planning for the trip has begun in earnest and we are really looking forward to experiencing this fascinating country and supporting the staff of the Fund for Armenian Relief’s Children’s Centre https://farusa.org/child-protection/children-center/. The Centre cares for children who have faced many challenges in their lives, including the loss of family, war and persecution.  Many have fled the war in Syria or conflict in other Middle Eastern countries, and have travelled alone as refugees. 

Armenia was the first country to adopt Christianity as its official religion in the 4th century, and today has become a safe haven for Christian refugees, many of Armenian descent. Armenia is one of the poorer former Soviet states.  Parts of the country have never recovered from a devastating earthquake in 1988 that killed nearly 50,000 people and left half a million homeless. Yet it has generously offered refuge and citizenship to Syrian Armenians, even though this has had the effect of reducing the aid available from UNHCR as these refugees were no longer stateless.  This is a big burden for a small country with limited resources. 

In October 2018 and June 2019 there were terrible mudslides in Bududa district in the eastern part of the Uganda.  It is on the slopes of Mt. Elgon, where coffee is grown. The Ministry of Gender Labour and Social Development sent a team which included one of our CATT practitioners, Paul Waluya. They went to carry out a needs assessment and to support the survivors psychologically as much as they could. They found that children have been especially affected and when the sky gets cloudy and there are signs of rain, they stop playing and start crying. Many of the survivors reported continuous nightmares and flashbacks of the landslides. Paul used psycho-education to help them understand their feels of acute stress, and wishes to use CATT with those who go on to develop PTSD. We hope to support him in the future to continue this work, as Government funding has now finished. Paul is a really effective trauma practitioner, and we are very proud of him.

 We are now deep into our project to raise the profile of ACT International during our 10th anniversary year (2020) and achieve significant growth thereafter to ensure our sustainability. We are working closely with Jonathan Andrews of Remarkable Partnerships to raise awareness of what we do and to meet potential corporate partners. We look forward to reaping the rewards of all our preparatory activity before the year is out!