The year was 2004 and US-based Jonah Spear, 23, at the time, was all set to begin a career in the world of films having earned a string of degrees in arts, theatre and dance from the Eugene Lang College The New School for of Liberal Arts in New York and from colleges in London and Russia.
However, destiny had other things in store for him. The tsunami, which hit many parts of Asia particularly Sri Lanka that year changed his life.
"I recall watching the footage on television with my parents that fateful day - December 26. The visuals were heart rending and we decided to do something," says Spear, who was in Dubai recently on his way back to his hometown New York from Japan, where he was busy helping those affected by the recent earthquake.
Helping people who are in need is not new to him or his family. In fact it is a value ingrained in him by his parents William and Joan Spear who run Fortunate Blessings Foundation (FBF) in Bantam, Connecticut. William is a community health counsellor and, along with his wife, provides free counselling to families of terminally ill patients to help them cope with the impending loss of life. They also offer counselling on sustainable living and coping with bereavement.
The moment his father saw on TV the devastation the tsunami had caused, he got together the FBF members and drew up plans to provide financial and other aid to the survivors. He also put together a team of volunteers to visit Sri Lanka and help the victims. "By early January 2005, my father had put together the first FBF team to go to Sri Lanka," says Spear. The team included counsellors to help people suffering from the stress following the catastrophe. (Several FBF teams went to Sri Lanka throughout 2005 to carry out the projects.)
"[When I witnessed the devastation on TV] I, like them, wanted to be of service - to do what I could to help relieve suffering in the world." So when he voiced his desire to join the team going to Sri Lanka, his father had no problems with that. "Raise money to buy your ticket to Sri Lanka," he told Spear.
"I had to raise $3,000 (around Dh11,000) within three days. I had no idea where I would get the money from but spread the word around and in two days raised the amount," he says.
On January 21, Spear arrived in Colombo as part of a four-member team that included his father, trauma expert Rony Berger and Jane Woodward, a trauma care nurse who was to train about 150 local residents in trauma care.
Watching the actual tsunami-hit landscape was disturbing. "The level of destruction was unimaginable," he says. There were many aid groups providing medical aid, building shelter and providing food. But my focus was to help children cope with grief and trauma. Many had lost their parents and were facing a bleak future, living in temporary camps and shelters."
A new beginning
When a major natural disaster occurs, many organisations rush supplies and aid to survivors in the form of food, clothing, medicines and tents, which are all necessary to rebuild lives. But one important factor that's often overlooked is the victims' mental well-being, particularly that of the children. The trauma caused by loss can leave a deep wound on young impressionable minds and if that is not dealt with at the earliest, can leave them scarred for life.
Spear had worked as a camp counsellor during his college days and also has a wealth of experience having worked with FBF on several projects. Utilising the skills he learnt in theatre and acting classes, he had developed a comprehensive therapy package to help children suffering from stress disorders. "The techniques were developed in consultation with doctors, psychologists and experts in traumatology,'' he says.
Healing the pain of bereavement
"When an adult is caught by surprise by a giant wave coming at him, he gets surprised, scared, angry... these are natural emotions. It's different in children; they have a less logical response. Their thoughts freeze, muscles contract, heartbeat speeds up, breath shortens and they lose the natural rhythm of the body. While elders recover their body rhythm in a couple of weeks when they stop replaying the disaster scene in their minds, children suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) take a longer time to recover," says Spear.
Although Spear had worked with children suffering from PTSD while in the US, he was a trifle flummoxed when it came to counselling the children in Sri Lanka simply because of the sheer scale of the operation and the number of children who were affected. At a camp on the first day of his arrival, a large group of children and elders gathered around him as he began the therapy session. "The first thing I wanted them to do was to respond to me - to follow my actions, to express their feelings... I began with a call-response act of clapping in rhythm. Pretty soon, the children began responding to my call and started clapping in unison and I knew [that my programme had begun to take effect].
"Then I started laughing hysterically encouraging them to laugh out loud as well. And they too started laughing out loud. Then I began moving my body while laughing out loud, then started crying... and the children followed all my actions.
"All these actions were a sort of mock grieving to encourage the children to express their sorrows through actions. Even though the crying was not real, the act produces a physical response in the body that is similar to what happens when a person genuinely cries. Soon, the muscles that are tense and taut begin to relax.
The point of the therapy is to help children relax. "We work to restore rhythm, balance, flexibility, energy flow and a sense of freedom - emotional and physical - through the facilitated self-expression and play that we engage in with the group.
"We stomp and clap, we scream, laugh and cry. We stretch out bodies and move in ways many people have never moved before.'' All these actions help the children overcome their fears and get back to their usual self, how they were before the trauma occurred.
Once he earned the children's trust, they began to open up to him. He recalls a poignant moment when three children, holding his hand led him up a hillock. There they pointed to three graves. "‘That's my mother, that's my father, that's my brother…' the three of them told me,'' recalls Spear. "It was heart-rending.
During the three weeks that Spear was in Sri Lanka, he structured a programme to help children cope with the stress and to recover from the trauma they underwent. "Sri Lanka prepared me for coping with the March 11 tsunami in Japan. I realised I had a far greater capacity to deal with the trauma of thousands of Japanese children."
Reaching out to Japan
On May 7 this year, Spear once more flew out of New York as part of a FBF three-member Japanese Trauma Team to Tokyo.
"Our mission began on May 10 as we visited camp after camp, connecting with children in the worst-hit region of Sendai and Ishinomaki, training local volunteers as we went along.''
Spear who drove along the trail of devastation was shocked to see the destruction particularly in the city of Ishinomaki at the epicentre of the quake. "The greater the magnitude and scale of devastation the larger was the impact of the trauma on the consciousness of numerous Japanese children.''
Here again Spear created a structured programme to aid the mental health of the children. "I refined my programme from just an improvisation act of laughing, crying and screaming into a very clear ten-step programme to help children with PTSD. The first step was the calling response step where we clap and expect children to clap back in the same rhythm. So if it is two claps followed by five continuous claps, they respond accordingly.
"The second step was to do with loosening up bodies, wrists, shoulders. The Japanese culture is a very quiet culture and many of the people do not even move their bodies until there is an absolute need to do so. We got them to pound on their chest, stomach, laugh until they cried, even if it meant fake crying.''
Spear recounts his experience at the Shokei Gakuin Girls High School. After a series of trust building and loosening up exercises, Spear started with rhythmic clapping, getting them to unify in a cohesive whole. He continued clapping adding complex rhythms, including stomping, finger snapping and eventually inhaling and exhaling in rhythm. Within 20 minutes into the exercise one girl identified the trauma specialist Berger as a father figure, and ran up to hug him. In fact, when they met the next day, she ran up to him calling out ‘Papa, Papa'. She then told the group that she was able to sleep well for the first time in so many days. "This was the best feedback we could get. Whenever children told us they had slept well after many days, I knew the exercises were working.
"The three-day workshop at the school was attended with enthusiasm by not only the students but by the teachers as well. I ended these sessions with a breathing exercise, which would relax the participant."
Spear continued this work going to different centres, training local volunteers for the next ten days until the team flew back on May 19.
"I am so glad I was able to help, I got an opportunity to visit such a beautiful country and experience their culture. As for my programme we are clear that our techniques are extremely effective. For one thing, we see change in body language immediately.
"There's a UCLA study, among countless others, that suggests communication is over 93 per cent non-verbal. To think our emotions are separate from our bodies is narrow at best.
"Our emotions live in our bodies. We feel in our bodies,'' he says. We can release our negative thoughts and feelings by opening up our bodies with movement and sound, he adds.
"We're not saying this programme is perfect or permanent. But in our experience, for many, it is just this interruption of the pattern - this moving of energy in the body and reconnection with our natural ability to heal ourselves that is the key to recovery."
He wants to put his programme in practise for every day situations in life.
He hopes that the overall ideas that went into developing the programme can be integrated in any way caregivers would like.
"Children are brought up in such a tense world. So much pressure to behave a certain way, to do it ‘right' to stand up straight, to be serious. Flexibility, creativity, ease, playfulness and a sense of humour are all signs of psychological health. When we respond to traumatic events with rigidity - saying things like ‘we must be strong and hold it all in' - we are fighting our natural desire to express emotions. When children are taught to embrace and express their emotions and not to fear them, they can have compassion for themselves and for each other.
"Remember, parents have emotions too, all humans do. So this work is not just for kids. It's for everyone.''
Spear intends revisiting Sri Lanka and Japan and following up on his work there. "I will continue doing this for as long as I can. At the end of the day I am able to sleep well knowing I am doing the best I can."
Making A Difference
Who: Jonah Spear, dancer-actor-filmmaker and a volunteer for Fortunate Blessings Foundation (FBF)
What: Spear has structured a therapy to help little child victims of tsunamis and earthquakes in Sri Lanka, Samoa, Java and Japan, cope with Post Traumatic Stress disorder (PTSD) following natural disasters
Why: The recent tsunamis and earthquakes have resulted in thousands of children suffering from PTSD who require restoration of their mental strength in order to cope with life.
Inside Info :
To know more about FBF, log onto http://www.fortunateblessings.org or email at william@williamspear.com or william@fortunateblessings.org