Fariba
Shahmorady stands by a table in the Iran Red Crescent Society
(IRCS) centre in Bam, finger-painting a serene picture of two
swans swimming on a lake, with mountains in the background.
The young Iranian woman explains that swans are a symbol of
calm. She needs calm.
“I remember it all vividly,” she says, referring
to the morning of 26 December 2003 when a strong earthquake
killed at least 26,000 people and destroyed 85 per cent of the
buildings in Bam.
“I remember being under the rubble and I remember how
my sister died beside me. Nobody was there to save her. This
class helps me cope with those memories,” Fariba says.
Fariba lost her brother and sister as well as two of her sister’s
children in the disaster. She spent two hours under the rubble
of her home before neighbours and relatives pulled her out.
Now she is one of more than 5,600 people who have benefitted
from Red Crescent psychological support programmes for the traumatized
population of Bam.
“Twelve months later, signs of the devastation are still
evident, not just in the collapsed buildings but in peoples’
minds,” says Mohammed Mukhier, head of delegation for
the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
in Iran. “Integrating psychological support into the relief
effort right from the beginning of a sudden-onset disaster is
a model that could be used more widely.”
The Bam relief operation is the first one in the history of
the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement where extensive psychological
support has been deployed immediately following a large scale
disaster. It could become a model for future disaster response.
“Traditional rescue work is important but providing psychological
support to the victims as well as to the relief workers afterwards
is at least as important,” says Bijan Daftari, head of
the IRCS Rescue and Relief Organisation.
Daftari is currently working on strengthening further the IRCS
disaster response capability.
That includes an extensive training programme for relief officers,
restocking warehouses and strengthening a team of sniffer dogs.
The programmes are supported by the International Federation
and a number of Red Cross societies.
A mobile hospital which the Finnish and Norwegian Red Cross
societies flew into Bam within 72 hours of the earthquake now
serves as Bam’s emergency medical centre. Next year, when
a new city hospital is scheduled to open, the Red Cross Red
Crescent temporary hospital will be dismantled and moved to
Tehran where it will serve as part of an emergency response
unit that can be deployed anywhere in the region.
But even as traditional disaster preparedness work continues,
the experience of Bam shows how psychological support can be
integrated into the response to sudden-onset disasters.
In the first few weeks after the earthquake, Iranian Red Crescent
staff and volunteers in Bam interviewed almost 4,000 families,
who at that time were mostly living in tents. They talked to
20,000 people and now, one year after the disaster, more than
5,600 people have benefitted from psychological support programmes.
Those programmes are backed by the Red Cross societies of Iceland,
Denmark and Italy with major funding from ECHO, the European
Union’s humanitarian office.
“The aim of the group activities is to get people to talk
about their experiences and not to keep them tucked away in
an isolated corner of their minds,” says Ms. Aghdas Coffee,
who is in charge of implementing the IRCS psychological support
programmes in Bam. Even today, new cases are being registered.
One Red Crescent counselling centre in Bam received 129
new patients diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder during
the month of September 2004.
One beneficiary of those programmes is Maryam Tavakoli, a housewife
now living in one of the temporary container-houses provided
by authorities on the outskirts of Bam. As she sits with her
young daughter on the floor of an IRCS container along with
seven other women, doing embroidery, she reflects on the disaster
that claimed the life of her mother.
“Coming here helps me to not think about the earthquake
constantly. Here I am busy,” she says. “Sometimes
bad memories do come back, though,” her neighbour Nezhat
Langari Zadeh adds. “But as long as life goes on, we must
keep on living.”
It is a refrain that seems distant at Bam’s main cemetery
on Thursday afternoons. That is when thousands of people gather
to mourn their loved ones. As dusk settles over the devastated
city, men, women and children sit by gravesites, some crying
but most just looking silently at pictures carved on tombstones.
“Why have you left me, my son,” cries one woman
overcome with emotion. An elderly lady hands out dates, Bam’s
main agricultural product. A religious leader reads from the
Koran to a large gathering by one of the graves.
In the Ali Ibn Abi Taleb orphanage in Moemen Abad village, just
outside Bam, a dozen 8- to 11-year-old boys pretend to drive
cars. When a lady from the Red Crescent points to a green dot,
they take off and run in circles with their hands on a make-belief
steering wheel, their voices making the sounds of a racing car
engine. When she points to a red dot, they come to a screeching
halt.
Some of these boys lost their parents to the earthquake, others
have parents addicted to drugs and have no relatives that can
take them in. Bam is on the drugs route from Afghanistan and
Pakistan. Drug abuse in Bam increased dramatically in the past
year, another consequence of the disaster, relief workers say.
Michele Sanchez, from the Italian Red Cross, works with the
Iranian Red Crescent psychological support programme.
“It’s obvious that reconstruction is a basic need
but this doesn’t mean there are no other needs, whose
consequences you can discover later. What we are doing here
with children, play therapy, is a very important part of this
work. A child can suffer the consequences of a bad experience
for its whole life.”
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Boys
will be boys: playing football in the ruins of Bam, one
year after the earthquake that killed 26,000 people and
left more than 75,000 homeless (p12330)
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Attending
a Red Crescent finger-painting class, Fariba Shahmorady
reflects on the time when she was buried in the rubble
of her home for two hours. Her classmates all lost close
relatives in the devastating earthquake of 26 December
2003 (p12326)
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Maryam
Tavakoli clutches her young daughter in her arms as she
practises her needlework during a Red Crescent therapy
session (p12324)
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On
Thursday afternoons, thousands of people gather at Bam’s
main cemetery to mourn their loved ones. “Why have
you left me, my son,” cried one woman sitting beside
a tombstone (P12328)
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Boys
participate in play-therapy at an orphanage just outside
Bam. “A child can suffer the consequences of a bad
experience for its whole life,” says Italian Red
Cross delegate Michele Sanchez (p12329)
A family from Bam strolls through the ancient citadel
of Bam, a world heritage site that may be as old as 2,000
years. The citadel was completely destroyed in the 12-second
earthquake (p12331)
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News
