Philippe Denis

This article is about the "memory box" program run by the Sinomlando Centre in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Children whose parents have died construct these boxes and fill them with clothes, letters, mementos, photos and so on, often with the help of adults who remember their parents. In addition, the program facilitators conduct interviews with people who knew the parents, and compile a record of their memories--for the children, to be sure, but also a record of that person for the world, by those who loved them. The results for the children are huge--not only a chance to grieve, not only a sense of continued connection with the parent, not even just a sense of identity (family, clan, tribe, religion)--but in some cases, like that of a girl named Thandazile presented here, even a chance for children to reunite with still-living but estranged parents they didn't even know they had. It's the intersection of child counselling, narrative therapy, and oral history, and it's wonderful. This is exactly the direction I'd like to take our memory book project, if that were to become possible (as an organization focused on medical and counselling support, rather than oral history as Sinomlando, the place I work--TASO in Uganda--is unlikely to be able to take on a memory project of this scope). The key of course is building children's resilience through a sense of situatedness and a life story, giving them themselves the capacity to prevent, defuse, or surmount adversity and trauma. It does this by working on the way memory is encoded, transforming distressing associations into calming ones. Thus, there is also an aspect of working with the families to help the child acquire positive memories while their parents are still alive--and even, by embarking explicitly on a process, giving them more memories in general through a conscious association of ideas--rehearsal of the experience and validation by a third party. The key is "re-remembering"; making "sense of his history, to distance himself from this history, to step back enough to be able to live better in the present, and to advance more freely towards the future." It's great. AIDS Bulletin.… (altro)