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Opportunity Makes the Difference
By Janet McGiffin
Refugees, like all the world’s people, want to wake up in the morning to a chosen life filled with family, friends and opportunities. They want to feel in control of their destinies. They want reasons to smile. For Iraqi refugees in Cairo, the lack of opportunities can lead to feelings of distress.It is difficult for refugees to know what they can do to best move their lives forward. Dr. Nancy Baron, is an American Psychologist/ Family Therapist with 18 years of experience assisting war affected populations in Africa, Asia, Europe and the South Pacific cope with their experiences. She is currently in Cairo consulting to AMERA, Terre des Hommes and the American University in Cairo. In this second article for Iraqi Voices in Cairo, Dr. Baron talks about how how having opportunities can play a part in helping to manage feelings of distress.
For counsellors working with refugees, it is difficult to know how to best empower someone who desperately wants, needs and is entitled to something that he or she simply cannot have. For refugees, this can be their homes, families, or certain opportunities for work or school. For many refugees, including the Iraqis in Cairo, these opportunities simply do not exist right now. So they struggle to cope with the resulting distress.
The counsellor’s task is to try to find ways to empower refugees and assist them to decrease feelings of distress. They empower them by trying to help them to find what they CAN DO not just ruminate about what they can’t do. They need to help them to feel good enough to make thoughtful decisions, take care of themselves and their families the best that they can, not get involved in unhealthy behaviours, and look towards the light at the end of the tunnel. However, when a refugee looks into a mirror and sees someone who used to exist in a certain way but doesn’t seem to exist in the same way anymore, it is difficult to feel anything but distress.
It is also difficult for counsellors to help refugees to understand their distress and feelings of sadness, loss, anxiety and depression and find resources both internally as well as externally. Counsellors can help people connect past events to present events, and eventually to the future. However, for refugees who do not want or like their foreseeable future, counselling is not enough to move them out of the horror of the past to an acceptable future when little that they want seems to wait on the other side of their distress. Having and accepting opportunities can make a big difference. If opportunities are available, counsellors can help refugees understand where their feelings of distress are coming from, help reduce the feelings of despair and then empower the refugees to engage in the available opportunities. This is difficult to do when there are only a few, or poor, or dangerous opportunities and refugees either are hesitant or refuse to accept those that are available.
There are many consequences for a lack of opportunity. It is logical consequence that frustrated parents who feel worried and miserable about their inability to provide opportunities for their children could end up with headaches, chest and stomach pain and many other physical ailments due to their feelings of distress. Iraqi patients seeing Doctors through NGOS in Cairo report a high level of physical complaints that are likely due to their feelings of distress. This is common in refugee populations. Often it is difficult for refugees to know that their physical pains and illnesses are actually generated from their feelings of distress. They want medication to help them to feel better. Many do not need medication, they need to reduce their distress which might happen with having more opportunities.
Many Iraqi refugees in Cairo sit in their apartments day after day thinking again what happened to them. Ruminating about a serious problem day after day without adding new positive experiences can certainly lead to feelings of distress. Having opportunities and new experiences are important as ways to move beyond the distress!!! Other refugee populations living in Cairo, such as the Sudanese, have had more time to create opportunities. With the assistance of foreign NGOs, the Sudanese have established church-based schools, health facilities, and other self-help mechanisms. Iraqis, on the other hand, are only in the very beginning stages of developing these opportunities. Many Sudanese have lived in Cairo for twenty years or more, compared to the Iraqi population which has been in Cairo only a few years—a few months for some. In the world of refugees, unfortunately, this is not a long time. The hardest question is about how long the Iraqis will actually be in Cairo. Of course, everyone hopes it is short term, only a few more months. Yet, no one really knows.
For Iraqis in Cairo to create opportunities for schools, health centers, and social centers will require time and acceptance that they will be refugees in Cairo long enough to make it worth the time to create these servces. It also requires organization. The Iraqis in Cairo will need to trust each other enough to work together. No one, not the UN, or the government or NGOS will ever, even in the best of circumstances create enough opportunities for refugees. Resources are never enough and refugees most often are entitled to far more than is actually available. Sadly, the available opportunities might not be just what people want, but they might be all that can be made available. Being able to cope with a less than adequate situation becomes the responsibility of each person, adult and child, men and women, boys and girls. Balancing how to strive to create opportunities, push the limits yet take advantage of whatever is there the best they can. Day by day the Iraqi refugees of Cairo can watch their situation and eventually will need to decide if they need to organize to create opportunities for themselves and if they do then how to best do it.
