Bringing Comfort to Quake Survivors

Just as Feng Xiaogang's movie Aftershock shows, it's easy to reconstruct houses in the aftermath of an earthquake, but overcoming the mental trauma can take a long time.

Wang Manfen (not her real name) took three years to rebuild her confidence after enduring the devastating temblor in Wenchuan, in Southwest China's Sichuan Province, on May 12, 2008.

Wang is a 50-year-old woman living in Beichuan Township. She lost three family members in the quake - one of her two sons, a daughter-in-law and a grandson. She and her husband were also severely injured.

In addition to the bereavement, Wang's family also suffered heavy financial losses. Before the disaster came, her husband used to run a building materials business while she managed a hardware store.

Wang found she couldn't rid herself of the pain of losing relatives and stayed in her house all day. Scenes of the quake and the faces of her deceased family members kept surfacing in her mind and she rarely communicated with other people.

Thanks to the psychological assistance service provided by the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and other volunteers, Wang gradually opened up and began to share her feelings with psychology counselors. Experts from the institute arrived in Beichuan as early as June 2008 and immediately started their work in bringing some comfort to surviving victims of the disaster.

In order to encourage her to come to terms with her relatives' deaths, a specially designed farewell ceremony was held with the help of volunteers, in which she wrote what she wanted to say to the deceased on a heart-shaped piece of paper which she then burned as she said her last farewells.

Wang was also encouraged to take part in all kinds of entertainment activities with other survivors of the disaster by the volunteers in order to increase the opportunities for communication with other people, which they saw as a beneficial way to rebuild her self-confidence.

After more than one year of psychological counseling in the quake-hit areas, initiated by the China Soong Ching Ling Foundation and sponsored by Nokia (China) Investment Co, the Sunshine Project was launched in December, 2009. This was a joint effort involving Non-Profit Incubator (NPI), a group dedicated to the development of nongovernmental organizations, Beiing Musetech Co, Ltd and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

"Post-disaster reconstruction is not just about rebuilding towns. Psychological reconstruction is more important and urgent," said Zhu Zhuohong, an expert from the Institute of Psychology at CAS.

The program offers survivors of the quake a hot line through which they could receive psychological counseling. It also sends voluntary consultants to their homes for a face-to-face talk. In addition, a mobile phone-based platform used for psychological assessments was introduced with technical support from Nokia and Beijing Musetech.

"I saw Wang in July 2009 in her prefabricated house for the first time, when she was refusing to work and remained quite pessimistic about the future," said Fang Ruojiao, a volunteer who had been following Wang's case.

Wang said: "I used to be a capable business woman, rising from obscurity to earn millions of yuan," Wang told Fang in 2010. The volunteer saw this statement as a sign of Wang's mental recovery.

Now Wang has moved to a new house in Beichuan and is busy preparing for the opening of her new shop selling communication equipment and related facilities.

So far, more than 200,000 people have used the mobile phone-based psychology service and about 1,500 people have dialed the hot line or come to the counseling center to receive psychological comfort. A majority of them are youngsters and their parents.

"In the Sunshine Project, we not only offer financial support but also provide scientific research resources," said Fu Lei, head of the corporate social responsibility department of Nokia (China) Investment Co.

But the demand for psychological counseling is huge compared with the number of volunteers, Fang said.

"That's why over the past three years they invited many experts from different institutions to train local psychological consultants here," Fang added.

These experts and professors are from the University of Hong Kong, Beijing Normal University and organizations including Social Workers Across Borders and Medecins Sans Frontiers (French for Doctors Without Borders), an international nongovernmental organization for humanitarian medical assistance worldwide.