Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities HROC Background Healing

Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities

HROC Background Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities (HROC) has started in Rwanda in February 2003 and from then has based all its activities on community based approach that integrated elements of psychosocial care activities that didn’t only target personal emotional healing but also an integrated communal healing through the trust rebuilding within a safer community and slowly these have been possible through our underlying core beliefs that in every person there is something that is good, each person and society has the inner good and wisdom which should be sought and shared with others, it is through this effort trust can begin to be restored

Cont, We believe since our start and have seen that both victims and perpetrators of violence experience trauma and after-effects. We have seen that violence is experienced at both personal and community level. Therefore efforts to heal and rebuild communities must also happen at both the individual and community level. Participants during HROC Basic Workshop

Cont, We believe that healing from trauma and building peace between groups are deeply connected; we learned that it is impossible to do one without the other. Therefore trauma healing and peace building efforts must happen simultaneously. And that is what we aim in whatever we do. HROC program is a direct expression of these principles.

Cont, Initially victims/survivors and perpetrators were our first target group but we considered to leave none behind, in case needed we include bystanders to make sure all components of the community are involved in the process. Group photo after the workshop

HROC activities depending on the contexts are: • HROC Basic workshops, these workshops last for 3 days where participants representing the target groups including gender consideration who are a manageable group of between 16 participants to 25 of all community representative where on the first day they gain general knowledge about trauma, its causes, symptoms and it consequences at individual, family and community levels, the second day of the basic workshops is concentrated on personal healing journey and the last day is concentrated on community trust building.

Cont, • Advanced workshops, these are capacity building workshops that put much emphasis on understanding and practice active listening as the core to helping in the healing journey • Follow-ups sessions, these includes several visits to the participants in their community to explore together the journey of healing, challenges facing and possible mechanisms to face them. • Community Celebrations, these are one event at the community level after conducting a series of workshops in a given community to bring awareness to the community opinion leaders and members in general and call each and everyone to facilitate in the healing process.

Healing is a process not an event and each community is unique that requires enough follow-ups, this requires truly committed people, the biggest challenge we face since the start is the scarcity of funds and little understand on the importance of trauma healing work. Trust walk

In Rwanda we currently don’t have any other organizations independently using our HROC approach, as most of the time we have been invited to coordinate this where the similar activities were needed but outside of Rwanda there are several organizations that use HROC programs in their peace building approaches. Few examples are like Search for Common Ground in the DR Congo, Catholic Relief Service in Central African Republic, etc . . . others in different countries we require other prior arrangements to train their people willing to use HROC approach in their peace building initiatives and we spent sometime with them doing follow ups on how to implement the program by their own. Namaste!!!!