To Serve, With Love

I’ve previously mentioned my friend Sonali, whose assistance in finding housing has been invaluable, and with whom I’ve had some incredibly enlightening and uplifting conversations. She is the founder of the NGO Dreamcatchers, with which I worked when I came here 4 years ago, and have started working with again. Dreamcatchers works with people who have suffered deep traumas, from victims of the 2004 tsunami, to urban slum dwellers, to kids who have taken to the streets to escape from abuse at home. While there are many great organizations working on housing and feeding these people, Dreamcatchers’ mission is to attend to their spiritual and emotional health, to cultivate self-love and -respect and –empowerment, to begin the process of healing these deep wounds and generating a sense of wholeness in the individual. They have experienced such deep traumas that they can’t see themselves as worthy of anything good, and sink into meaninglessness and hopelessness. Using storytelling, music, art, quotes, poetry, images, movement, meditation, visualization, and group discussion, Dreamcatchers helps to create experiences which give people a renewed sense of themselves and their own inner power, which is, in some cases, the only thing that they can give again to themselves. We seek to integrate the various aspects of the individual which have been separated due to the trauma, and restore to them the sense of self and wholeness which has been shattered.

The 2004 tsunami, for example, destroyed the culture of many small fishing villages in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Dreamcatchers did intergenerational work with these villages, helping the children to reconnect with the elders so that village traditions could be restored and continued. By using storytelling and imagery, the older generation could relay the traditions in ways that were clearly communicated to the younger villages, and the kids of the village could share their fears and dreams about the future of the village. Together, the villages could unite in a common cause of rebuilding, with a shared vision of the future, and the youth were more responsive to the elders in the restoration of the past, while the elders were more flexible with the changes that the younger villagers dreamed of for the future.

In many other ways, Dreamcatchers works with traumatized children who have lost a sense of self, and allows them the space to express themselves, discharge some of the heat, and recognize the ways in which they do have inner strength, power, and creativity. We can’t always change the difficult external situations in which these kids find themselves, but perhaps we can change how the kids respond, by giving them internal emotional, cognitive, and spiritual skills so that they don’t lose themselves and they don’t come to expect the abuse, or think they deserve nothing more. We help them to catch their dreams and make them specific, whether through drawings or narratives, and hopefully we help them see their own unique talents. India is a culture where the individual can be made to feel insignificant in the group or family for reasons of gender or class, and lose themselves in favor of others who are seemingly more important. It always amazes me how high the suicide rate is here; women killing themselves because they can’t give their husbands children, or men because they can’t support their families. There are so many who live unseen, unrecognized, and when this starts in childhood, it is tragic. This is what Dreamcatchers addresses; giving these people a sense that they matter, and they deserve love and respect.

Yesterday we met with two women from Protsahan, a fabulous NGO that works with girls on the streets of Delhi. The founder quit her corporate job because she felt a calling (she said her father cried for a week, but now is quite proud), and her partner joined last year, after she awoke to her own childhood traumas and wanted to save other girls from the same fate. They are both in their upper 20’s, and Protsahan (which means encouragement in Hindi) is really starting to get attention for the great work they do. The founder used to make corporate training films, and now Protsahan enables their girls to make their own films on subjects like menstrual hygiene, the importance of education for girls (in this population, the boys go to school, but the girls aren’t generally sent), and issues related to physical and sexual abuse. The girls make the videos, show them to their friends, and not only do the filmmakers awake to their talents, the rest of the girls are inspired to find their own talents, and are more open to the content of the films because they come from their friends. Both women are great; the future of India. We had a fantastic discussion about the work; about scaling vertically rather than horizontally, in the sense that we want our programs to be flexible enough to reach each person in an authentic way, rather than just increase the number of people exposed superficially. We also talked about the parallel work of healing oneself and serving others, and that you don’t have to wait for any level of personal development to serve, because the service itself is part of your own path of healing and integration.

It was a miraculous evening of conversation, dreams, hope, and love. Changing the world, one heart at a time. I'm honored just to be involved.