Mapping lost homes
Home Maps as a Record
Making 'mental maps' of where they used to live has an
additional important benefit. It would be the opportunity to re-create some life heritage for all the survivors of this tsunami
generation, children and adults alike. Moreover it would be a heritage for the children when they grow up, and even for
following generations. Hambantota, on the south coast of Sri Lanka, for instance, lost upto 1/3 of its homes and the neighbourhoods. Other places in Indonesia and elsewhere faced far worse. How will people remember their daily lives? In years to come, people will struggle to remember what the streets and community looked like in their neighbourhood which used to be so familiar. These reconstructed mental maps of their old home areas are like keeping photographs of loved ones. Most of the affected families will not have photos of their old homes and communities. Recording and preserving these life places and spaces has to be done fast.
Methods
There are organisations and groups with considerable experience on drawing or art therapy with children, as well as others with expertise in making participatory or mental maps. The basic ideas of drawing Home Maps are straightforward, and they all depend of course on the children being in a school or club group or with individual teachers in whom they have trust and confidence. Being and working/playing in such a group is much more important than the actual techniques of how to make the pictures and how to record them. Some children will easily just get on with it and make the maps, but others will be shy and uncertain and will need some structured activity to get started.
Children's maps include mapping the positive happy side of their neighbourhood, - play areas, gardens, areas for cricket or football and games, favourite shops and stands, or "secret places" where they play. The Maps can also include the less happy locations, places where children felt afraid for real reasons or just in their imagination.
Making the Maps
The children's maps can be of many types - Most simply, they can be imaginative sketch maps made with crayons, paints, marker pens, colour pencils, on paper or card; or painted on children's boxes.
There is no necessity to make the sketch maps to a consistent scale, or to be concerned with geographical exactness or precision. Precision is not the point, - what is essential is the content and how the child shows it.
Some sort of identification of the children's symbology (a map ´legend´) is needed, so that other local people can recognise and relate to what the children have drawn. This legend may have to be culturally translated if the pictures are to be used elsewhere.
Or, the children's images can be drawn upon standard
(topographic) maps of the locality, or on aerial photographs, if they are available, on which the children can mark their home areas, and their happy and unhappy places. Big prints or photocopies need to be enlarged of topographic maps, or images (of aerial photos, or perhaps good-resolution space images processed so that features are recognisable by children). Marking is not done by drawing on the map or air photo itself, but with marker pens on plastic overlays which cover the
map. Thus each child can make her or his own map separately on an overlay.
Alternatively, 3-dimensional models can be created: a stiff cardboard base can be used with little models of houses, trees, and special places stuck on it. Or, clay models could be made, but these are more complicated. All materials should be simple and cheap and easy to obtain.
Saving the Home Maps
It will be important to record the mental home maps that the children make, if they are to be also kept as a record or memory for the future.
Colours fade and the paper materials will get damaged
by damp and sun and salt and eaten by insects. A
simple and relatively inexpensive way to record them is to take digital photographs of each Map. A digital camera can be
borrowed for the whole group, and the images can be stored on several people's or institutional computers. This is faster than scanning, and if wanted, the pictures can be uploaded on the web for transmission.
Some hard copies, of course, should also be printed for the families and the schools as part of the therapeutic process. If the home maps were made by overlaying on aerial photos or topographic maps, then the digital photo can easily be recovered in a GIS format - when and if that is useful.
An alternative to taking digital photos, is to apply a portable digital scanner. There are low-resolution image scanners which are palm-sized, and in ´flipchart´ mode can scan a whole flip chart. http://www.lib.umich.edu/knc/howto/acroscan/
capshare2.pdf. But usually, a digital camera is handier.
Sources of Assistance
Drawing as Trauma Therapy
The International Child Art Foundation (ICAF) based in Washington DC is a member of an international network dealing with art therapy in the aftermath of the tsunami tragedy, called "Healing Arts of Tsunami Survivors". The website of ICAF is:
(
http://www.icaf.org/programs/healingarts/ tsunami/index_tsunami.html#tsu4)
ICAF has a downloadable Training Guidelines for workshop leaders, teachers, and other adults dealing with all kinds of trauma and stress:
(
http://www.icaf.org/programs/healingarts/tsunami/guidelines.pdf)
ICAF´s partners in South Asia are: