From January 8 to 12, a group of 8 missionaries, members of the Colombia Mission, participated in modules 2 and 3 of the training in Emergency Pedagogy (EP), carried out in the city of Santiago de Cali.
The subjects addressed were Psychotraumatology II – child and youth, Trauma and Spirituality, administered by Bernd Ruf, German teacher and creator of Emergency Pedagogy.
Besides the theoretical expositions, a team made up of members of the Colombian and Brazilian EP developed practical workshops for educational training in emergency interventions, based on the healing of traumas.
According to Carolina, missionary of Fraternidade – International Humanitarian Missions (FIHM), plastic artist and resident of Cali, “it is super important to be here and even more for Cali, because we need to be prepared to help both children and adults that have suffered in the shifts that are happening on the planet and are already being reflected in this city, such as the intensification of the migratory flow here. It is not by chance that this training is happening here at the beginning of this year.”
The FIHM has been accompanying and becoming trained in Emergency Pedagogy, strengthening a partnership that began in 2019 in the Roraima Mission, and continues getting even stronger in 2020.
Boris, missionary of the city of Medellin, musician and environmental engineer, feels the training “is very interesting, clarifying and useful in what we are developing in the Colombia Mission. I understood what a trauma meant, how it develops, the relationship of the trauma with its effect in the different age groups and the importance of being able to intervene in the first moments after the event of one, preventing the development of psychological and physical illnesses later on.
Going deeper into the conception of the seven-year stages in the development of human beings and what to work on in each one of them, was also important in all our activities. In this way, we will be able to better treat and approach the people with which we have contact in the Mission and who are going through acute crises.
We will continue to investigate this field so as to have more resources with which to work with the children and youths, and a possibility for activating our creative potential as missionaries.”
The Colombia Mission coordination also had the opportunity to have a meeting with Reinaldo Nascimento, EP coordinator in Brazil – who was with FIHM in the Seminar for Education in Emergency Situations and Humanitarian Responses in the Light-Community of Figueira – with the intention of visualizing future actions in Colombia and in other interventions that the EP may be involved in, an essential formation for dealing with the emergencies that are occurring in these times.
