Q&A: Healing the Wounds of War Through Yoga

• Suzanne Hoeksema interviews yoga teacher DEIRDRE SUMMERBELL (new york)
• Wednesday, December 23, 2009
• Inter Press Service

'Yoga gives these women back the sense that they still have untapped reserves of life and health and youth in them — that they are not old and maimed and sick at all, but still very much alive,' says Deirdre Summerbell, a yoga teacher and founder of the organisation Project Air.

Since its launch in 2007, thousands of women who were raped during the genocide in 1994, many of whom were consequently infected by HIV/AIDS, have been reached with yoga classes given by Project Air.

In partnership with local gynaecologic health centres that perform fistula operations for survivors of rape, the organisation is now planning to expand into the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman or girl.

With the formal endorsement by the United Nations — the first ever given to a yoga initiative — Summerbell is thinking of expanding into other areas as well, such as Burundi, Somalia and Sierra Leone, and has received suggestions from the U.N. to go into Gaza, Afghanistan, Guatemala and Colombia.

On a recent trip to New York, Summerbell spoke to IPS about the challenges of teaching yoga in poor and conflict-ridden countries to people who had experienced terrible emotional and physical damage.

'Having spent part of my youth in Tanzania, I saw many ideas from the West come and go in the region,' she said. 'Yet as well-meaning as some of those ideas were, they were often also naïve or worse, something I was afraid this yoga experiment would turn out to be, too.'

But the experiment proved instead to be successful and, as a result, it became the first time yoga was included as a programmed mental health service of a medical NGO in Africa (WE-ACTx).

Experts of the interview follow.

Q: Can you describe what you encounter when teaching yoga in a place like Rwanda? A: It is very different from the way women do yoga in the West. For Rwandan women, the 'body beautiful' is definitely not the first focus. And it's this that makes it more effective because these women have no preconceived ideas about yoga and what it is supposed to be.

In our classes, moreover, we confine ourselves to yoga as a physical exercise; it does not need the overlay of spirituality.

Yet one thing of course that is very painful is to ask women to be physically active when you know they do not have enough to eat and drink. Therefore, besides yoga mats, I also provide food and potable water. But I would like to create some sustainability in this respect by teaching the women, for example, how to disinfect water by means of the sun, which can serve as an income generation project too.

In terms of hostility towards us, we have encountered some difficulties as a result of a view espoused by Rwandan evangelical churches that yoga is a form of satanism. But, for me, the name yoga is not important. We may well call it psycho-physiotherapy or trauma mitigation. It is a means to an end.

Q: What kind of impact does yoga have on the women? A: There was one woman who said that her body and bones hurt all the time, and that during yoga, she did not feel the pain any more.

In the beginning they always think that they can't do it, that it is for children. 'I am too old for this,' a 28-year old woman will say. But when they start moving around and actually using their bodies, they suddenly feel proud of being strong and so end up leaving with big smiles on their faces.

With a strong body there comes a revolution in perspective. If you feel weak, you do not feel happy with yourself. But if you feel strong, you will begin to enjoy tremendous psychological benefits, as well.

And this applies not only to the women we work with, but also to their families. This is because they bring their children or their entire families with them, which means we sometimes end up with scores of additional people watching and participating in our classes.

Q: What is on your agenda? Will you be expanding into other regions? A: People are massively ignorant and indifferent to the use of rape as a tool of war, which is heartbreaking. It's a perpetual mystery to me why women tolerate this. Every conflict that uses a particular tool makes that tool acceptable for the next conflict to use.

Western women do have to stand up to these crimes. This is one of the underlying interests I have in teaching yoga to the women I work with. Of course, in every region we will need to adapt our approach to different cultural and social circumstances.

In the case of the DRC, we will most likely work with women and girls who have been recently raped and whose traumas are much fresher than those of the women we worked with in Rwanda.

Because it is a region at war, I know our safety cannot be guaranteed fully, but honestly, I would find it difficult to live with myself if I didn't do something to try to help.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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