Healing the hurting

The Central African Republic, CAR, has been through a long period of civil war, and will be recovering from the effects of it for a long time to come. Children as well as adults are hurting.

But a biblical trauma healing programme offers hope. 

A member of the team, shares what is involved with the program in CAR.

‘My colleagues report that after the years of conflict and violence in the Central African Republic, all the children are traumatised. They’ve all seen and heard things that are too much for a child to see and hear. There are lots of programmes to help adults here, but very few people are doing anything to help the children of CAR who have wounded hearts from what they’ve seen and heard. This programme uses good principles of mental health supported by Bible verses and Bible stories to help the children understand who they are and how God still loves them and cares for them.

A small team will be running a children’s biblical trauma healing programme in Bangui, August 14-25 2017. In the first week, we’ll train a group of Central African Christians already involved in caring for children and young people in churches, orphan-care centres, ‘safe’ places or children’s centres in refugee camps and so on. Then they’ll each bring a group of children along, who’ll be mixed into small groups to work with two adults for the next week.

The week’s ten sessions use lots of fun activities. There’s a real life story, Bible verses and the story of Joseph, games, crafts and activities which all help the children understand things like why there’s sin and evil in the world, God’s unchanging love and faithfulness, how to cope when the bad things happen, what you can do to help yourself and build good things into your life, grief and mourning, how to understand your own emotions, what to do if an adult’s abusing you, how to hand all the bad stuff to Jesus to deal with, how to give and receive forgiveness and more.’

Please pray:

  • that the right next group of new children’s workers will be found for training in the children’s trauma healing model/method
  • for God’s protection and provision over all the logistics (hall hire, transport for trainers and children each day, food and drinking water, health issues)
  • that the children who will most benefit from the week’s activities will be able to attend.

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