Interview: Lina Kostarova – Unkovska, director of the Center for Psychosocial and Crisis Action

Communication among the children is the basis for the development

 

Within the project “School networks – communities for multicultural development”, the Center for Psychosocial and Crisis Action has recently realized a few creative workshops in the Multimedia Center “Mala Stanica” under common title “Freedom of communication FOR…”. What is the purpose of such kind of work and the project in general and what are the results? 

The event you are talking about is part of a bigger project on the subject of “Relation and communication among schools in Western and Eastern Macedonia”, that has lasted for more than a year. The objective of this all-day event, in which 200 children and adults of different environments, cultures, age and sex took part, was to discover and test the potentials for change and development and the experience of freedoms of expressions and creations was to help moving the limits towards new forms and qualities of existence and relation… That is why it is called “Freedom of communication FOR…” creation, future, unity… The whole event created a field (ambient) for creative research, playing and experimenting with different modalities of expression and everyone could take part in his own way. There were workshops on: word, drama, rhythm, message, drawings, white canvas, installation, dough, body-art etc. The children and adults had not met before and different languages were used. In the beginning the activities were carried out in small groups and in the end they were related to one, completely new whole – which provided a new field of creation and change of roles and for a moment everyone could go out of what he was and try what he was not and had never thought could be…The evaluation of the event gave some additional and strong arguments for the need for creative participation of all community members – of all ages and cultures, in creating new spaces and expanding the limits of freedoms FOR…improvement, development, relation.    

 

How do you evaluate the situation in Macedonia today in the sphere of communication among pupils and their forming as individuals that have a need for overcoming the existing barriers, set by the political and social changes?
The communication among children, especially through games and exchange is the basis for development. In the early adolescence this contact becomes so important for the child that he occasionally manages to suppress even the closest relation to his parents. School is a social environment, with a big and unused potential for learning through games and experimenting. It implies nurturing the communication among all members of the school community, in all directions and levels – among different ages, sex and cultures and with various means. School might be the only place where one can learn safely and by experience, through different forms of cooperation, encouragement and sharing with others – how to communicate with their own eyes, wishes, expectations, injustice and how to be or experience something completely different. These opportunities are not even closely used in our schools, on the contrary, what dominates is avoiding behavior and withdrawal in narrow, closed circles. The conditions of long-lasting changes and the constant expectation for something to happen might be able to explain the mistrust and the need for people to withdraw, each in “his own”. There is no exchange, no growth, as if everything stopped…The solution to such conditions lies in the opposite, in what seems to be impossible, unusual or weird – in getting closer; in openness and curiosity, as replacement for the bad prognoses. In order to turn the circle in the opposite direction, we have to learn how to create new spaces and organize them in a different way – as spaces for games and freedom, where new facts and experiences would be safely tested, where the limits of the possible would be expanded. Children do it spontaneously and best when they take part in cooperative projects and actions with others (children and adults) from the community. We can mostly learn from them if we take them quite seriously.

 

In 2002-2003 with the project “Safe School” in Tetovo, among the other things, you made the first multiethnic show after the war conflict. How possible is it for this and some other positive examples to be implemented in the work of schools?
It was our first experience with “an intervention action” in the region after the conflict. And it was not only a show. It was a two-year project of a group of children from the primary school Lirija from Tetovo, who started workshops on children’s rights and their participation in the community, in order to get to the idea of relation and then research it (in many ways) and eventually realize it in a form of show. Pupils from all classes took part in the show, from V to VIII grade of both ethnic communities, Macedonian and Albanian, with a total of 16 presentations, chosen by them. The children, who had been going to the same school for years, but had not met because of the different shifts, had been preparing for this mutual show in front of their parents for days. For the parents it was also the first time to be together in the hall…And it was not easy, not for anyone. It took long preparations, a lot of patience and confident and competent leadership by adults, someone they could trust. The way the children took part in the whole process of preparations showed their incredible dedication, confidence and dignity that overcame the adults’ expectations. The children showed that they could deal with the most delicate topics and issues, such as relating the members of a post-conflict community, thus becoming a behavior model for the others…Unfortunately we cannot see it very often, the problem is again and always at the adults. Most of them think that the children’s projects are games and something they do in their spare time and that after that they should do something more serious, without noticing what they have learned and where they got in the meantime…and that the game is the most serious thing we need to nurture.

 

To what extent do you use foreign experiences and assistance and the existing domestic resources in your work, since the SFRY break-up and nowadays?
Foreign experiences, especially the expert ones in the field of crisis, trauma and recovery, at the beginning of the wars in this area were very useful. During the break-up of Yugoslavia we knew little about war traumas, or the nature and treatment of the post-trauma stress. Our first experiences with trauma were the meetings with young recruits – returnees from the army of the former Yugoslav Army in 1991. Soon after we had an opportunity to relate to the world names in this field, such as: Bob Painos (USA), Bill Jull (Britain), Atle Dyregrov and Nora Sveas from the Norwegian school, then the Israeli school for helpers’ assistance, the Oxford International Center for Refugee Issues etc.

But there was also some other, atypical situation we found ourselves into. With the beginning of the break-up of Yugoslavia we found ourselves in a double role of: professionals that were expected to help and victims at the same time, struck by the wars and the fear for our own safety, as a result of the conflict. Refugees from all over Yugoslavia started arriving in Macedonia and they were our people. For us, psychologists, it was both a professional and human challenge. Without any experience and skills in distancing these two roles, our work soon brought us to the level of combustion, that almost all of us have passed. For me it was the most difficult period, but at the same time the most fruitful in professional sense. In those conditions one learns quickly and directly and matures, too. To many psychologists that time has marked the road to their overall professional interest, engagement and development. Psychology as a discipline, unfortunately, or luckily, experiences its biggest rise in the periods after the wars, which means that it has mostly been built upon people’s mass tragedies. Our experience as helpers and victims at the same time has taught us something else – to see trauma as integral part of human life experiences, and not everyone necessarily has to come across it, but if one experiences it, there are opportunities to overcome it successfully. With this attitude we left the field of clinical diagnostics and we left a much bigger space for activating natural resources which both people and the community have plenty of, especially when the living conditions are difficult.

 

The Center for Psychosocial and Crisis Action is a professional agency that works on projects. Are you pleased with the so far communication and cooperation with the state and local institutions, schools and non-governmental organizations?
We are the first and maybe the only private professional agency in Macedonia that deals with crisis intervention, including whole communities, even networks of communities. We have excellent cooperation with everyone we share the field of intervention action with, and they are most often the schools, then some non-governmental organizations and part of the state and local institutions. Many of them know us well and we are recognizable by our way of work. We are still “invisible” for the highest state institutions. We interpret it as a form of  “defense ignorance” which we recognize everywhere where there is a fear for own positions that have been acquired by chance or by merits that have nothing to do with expertise, professionalism and ethic standards of a profession. They are closed circles where you will see how the same people move from one to another position all the time, regardless of the fact that they have done nothing properly for years. We are trying to function according to different principles. For now we can say that we are quite independent. We are self-financed, we fight for the survival of a whole team of employees and associates, working on a few projects at the same time, some of them being international. Some foreign governments and foundations have been our main donators for six years. We deal with them more easily and better than with the domestic ones. We certainly work all the time on improving the opportunities of the Macedonian institutions to recognize the need for such kind of organizations, for community development.