'Dad, I Don't Want to Die': Counseling for Youth

In areas near the border between Israel and Gaza, Israeli and Palestinian children are dealing with the psychological aftermath of bombs and shelling. In Gaza, Catholic Relief Services has distributed food and other humanitarian assistance. The agency also partially funds mental health programs for children traumatized by violence in the region.

Laura Sheahen, CRS' regional information officer for Europe and the Middle East, interviewed staff from the Gaza Community Mental Health Center. Here, they talk about what the children of Gaza are experiencing.

Dr. Hassan Zyadeh:

We're doing crisis intervention for injured people and their families, and the families of those who are killed. We try to get people to talk about their thoughts and emotions.

Dr. Yasser Abu Jamee:

The [children's] project started with internal clashes among Palestinians. A lot of children and youth were involved, directly and indirectly. Some local rockets were hitting the houses.

Drawings by children in Gaza have been made into posters for the Gaza Community Mental Health Clinic. CRS partially funds mental health programs for Gazan children traumatized by violence. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

So we conducted three summer camps in Gaza, with about 100 children in each summer camp. We conducted three main activities—storytelling, role-playing and free drawing—to let the child express what was happening around him. The child tells you what he feels when he is drawing a clash. For example, I can feel this child is having a problem because he is drawing [a picture of] blood. The other is healthy because he is drawing a garden.

You give the child an opportunity to express his feelings, to talk about the bad experience. You never know how much he is traumatized until you give him the idea to express the event.

Other children did role-playing. It was strange—some of the children were making a play about one of the people from Fatah who was killed and who was dragged by the cars [of] Hamas militants. They were simply doing it and redoing it.

Zyadeh:

As part of the CRS program, questionnaires were distributed at the summer camps last year. Based on these questionnaires, 70 children, ranging in age from 8 to 15, were identified as needing psychological intervention. Staff of the mental health clinic did home visits and family counseling, and set up a free phone counseling service, among other things.

Abu Jamee:

We also have meetings for groups of parents. The parents have many questions regarding the children. A lot of children complain of nightmares. The other thing is bed-wetting, even for 11- and 12-year-old children. I think the percentage is increasing. The other thing is aggression in children between the ages of 8 and 16, and hyperactivity in younger children. These are all signs that something is going wrong inside the child.

A child has limited ways of expressing his feelings. But he has questions: "Why did he die? What happened? Who killed him? Am I going to die in the same way?" So these are the ways the children do it—basically by asking questions.

The main thing is to give the child a safe place. His family is supposed to do this. Everything is relative. If you are living near a border like Jabalia, where are you going to go?

Zyadeh:

This is one of the main problems for the parents—how to convince their children that they can protect them when the houses are bombarded. There is no safe place in the whole Gaza Strip.

My son is saying to me, "Dad, I don't want to die. I want to live." What can I do? He has fears when he hears the helicopters and shelling. Sometimes you feel you can't answer their questions. This is a major problem for all the Palestinian parents in Gaza.

Barbara Celinska-Ismail:

My daughter is three and a half. We don't watch TV, and she's in a very safe place. She keeps telling me, "Mom, I want to live."

Zyadeh:

Sometimes my son and my daughter are watching the TV alone. They shout to me or their mom when seeing a scene of shooting or something. They want us to be with them when they are just watching TV. "Come sit near me," they say.

Abu Jamee:

The clashes between Fatah and Hamas were everywhere, even near my house. Once we went to the kitchen [to take cover]. Two days after that, my son, who was two and a half, kept saying "Takh, takh" ["bang, bang!"] whenever he heard a gun.

So you know what I did? [Once] we were at a wedding where some of the people had fireworks. He was trying to escape. I said, "Look, these are fireworks." He became happy.

Since that day, whenever we hear shooting, I tell him, "These are not gunshots, these are fireworks." What to do?