Helping hands
UVic researchers help tsunami victims turn to nature to rebuild their shattered lives
by Patty Pitts
Of all the images to be transmitted out of South Asia in the wake of the devastating Boxing Day tsunami, it's the photos of hollow-eyed children that are the most haunting. Youngsters who saw family and friends swept away by the huge waves and whose homes and schools and entire families were destroyed by the sea.
In just a few minutes, an entire generation was left to deal with grief, despair and uncertainty at a shockingly young age.
Dr. Philip Cook, executive director of UVic's International Institute for Child Rights and Development (IICRD), has seen this scale of emotional trauma before—among the AIDS orphans of South Africa and shell-shocked youngsters in war-torn Chechnya. Although it was nature that wreaked such havoc on the lives of children in Thailand, Indonesia and India, Cook says it's through nature that these same youngsters will begin the long process of healing.
"Reconnecting children to the natural world is the first step to reconnecting children to the human world," says Cook. He leaves soon for India as part of an initiative sponsored by Save the Children Canada to train teachers in tsunami-affected regions of India on ways to reach youngsters through nature-based therapy.
"This approach has been used very effectively with AIDS orphans in Africa and by aboriginal teams with abused First Nations children in Canada," he says. "In some cultures, discussing psychological issues does not come easily. Using an indirect approach leads to further, deeper discussion."
Cook has seen the healing power of nature among bombed-out apartments in Chechnya cities. Aid workers created small, formal gardens in the rubble and invited storytellers and artists to entertain the understandably skittish children.
"The kids started growing flowers and making their own art," says Cook. "It's been proven that children's development is tied to their capacity to explore the natural world. We see a positive improvement in their self-esteem, a feeling that they're in control of their lives. Children have a capacity for resilience and a relationship with the natural world enforces this."
The tsunami also destroyed livelihoods and caused serious environmental damage. UVic geographer and conservationist Dr. Philip Dearden has spent years assisting residents in developing countries create desperately needed employment without sacrificing sustainable practices.
Dearden and his research team have worked on many coastal conservation projects on Thailand's Andaman coast. They were doing an assessment of tourism impacts on reefs for the Thai government when the tsunami struck.
"There's a significant relationship between poverty and the environment," he says. "When the environment worsens, people get poorer and then, in their desperation to make a living, they damage the environment even more."
Under Dearden's supervision, UVic grad students are working in Thailand to understand some of the environmental impacts of the tsunami and how to rebuild livelihoods in a way that doesn't further erode the natural environment.
"Many of the resorts destroyed in the tsunami in Thailand were built illegally on property that was designated as parkland," says Dearden. "There's an opportunity here for governments to re-assert their claim to protected areas, but they must also find alternative employment for the residents whose livelihoods depended on those businesses."
Dearden has also been involved in coastal and development projects in Sri Lanka, including field surveys of the heavily damaged Tamil-controlled territory on the east coast and extensive work in the national park system, including the hard-hit Yala National Park.
He'll return to Sri Lanka in the spring to assist in the reconstruction effort, focusing on the country's national parks and the redevelopment of ecotourism businesses that were levelled by the tsunami.
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