Community Counselor - The Approach

The Approach

Quick deliberation in the emergency context resulted in a decision to adopt a lay community counselor model to deal with these challenges. Lay counselors are members of the community who are trained to provide a specific service or to perform certain limited activities. The concept of lay / community counselors is not new.

A large number of agencies outside of India, particularly in the United States and United Kingdom depend on the volunteer sector for counseling services (Bond, 1993). Therefore the strategy adopted by ADEPT was of community based counseling using volunteer lay community counselors who share a significant aspect of their background–culture, language and experience primarily - with the affected community .

Members from the affected communities, and others closely interacting with the local population such as teachers, government personnel etc., can be highly effective to reach out as community counselors as they represent the groups they are serving, and can readily gain access to them. This model works by strengthening the existing social support networks.

Lay counselors have been used in counseling of drug addicts, people living with or at risk for HIV / AIDS etc. Experiences have showed that paraprofessional counselors, who would work effectively in their home-community, can be produced with short-term training. Gluckstern (1972) reported success of a 60 hour training of parents as lay counselors. The study evaluated the effect of the program on the trainees with regard to knowledge and attitudes, the effect of the training upon the trainees with regard to counseling skills acquisition, and the role the trainees played in the community seven months after training. The results of the study indicated that the trainees did in fact learn the skills taught and did maintain them over a period of time. Peer counselors have been found to be more effective than regular professional care (Malchodi et al., 2003)

ADEPT’s community counselor overcame the issues of entry into community, those related to ethnocentrism, and the shortage of resources, by training members from within the affected community. These same counselors were especially effective as they were involved in the relief and recovery operations after the disaster.

Keeping in mind the limitations of the organization and the available resources the goals of the training were simple

• To train local volunteer community counselors in immediate crisis response and basics of trauma counseling.
• To help the community counselors to support survivors in their efforts to respond to the effects of Tsunami.
• To assist the counselors plan their activities in the aftermath of the Tsunami.

The participants were trained in the psychological effects of disasters, and simple guidelines with sample techniques to handle them, including vignettes and an assignment to design sample action plans targeting different situations. Training methodology was short interactive lectures combined with interactive group work and participatory plenary sessions. Training duration was three days. The entire training was conducted in the vernacular using simple language and avoiding technical terms and jargon. The design of the program included the preparation of the training module, identification of the target group, planning duration of the training and its methodology and post training professional support. The module was formulated for purposes of exigency and the material adapted from several open source documents. Training commenced on 11 January 2006. The training team included a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a trained counselor from the Arcot Lutheran Church and an aid worker, of the National Lutheran Health and Medical Board, trained in trauma counseling in aftermath of Gujarat Earthquake

The participants of the program were several members associated with the local communities, and grass root level leaders, especially those who have already been providing supportive service to the affected community prior to the Tsunami such as:

• Village Health Nurses and Health Inspectors
• Teachers
• Self Help Group members
• Youth Leaders
• Leaders of faith based organizations
• Community leaders
• Disaster Response workers

The expected outcomes of the training included basic skills of counseling such as the capacity:

• To understand reactions to trauma,
• To listen and help survivors to ventilate,
• To help survivors find privacy for the expression of emotions
• To support survivors in their efforts to achieve a sense of emotional safety by reassuring them that their reactions are acceptable and not uncommon,
• To help survivors begin to take control of the events going on around them
• To assist survivors in handling the practical issues that will face them in the aftermath of the Tsunami.
• To identify survivors with severe psychological problems and refer them to qualified experts/professionals.

The Training was designed for a three-day period to quickly equip the volunteer community counselors with the basic skills of counseling. Thereafter additional support and hand-holding was provided through fortnightly follow up half-day sessions over a three-month period that was participatory and interactive.

The Community Counselors took the initiative to sit and talk with the survivors, listen to them and be a part of their loss and this was immensely helpful. The survivors needed someone to empathize with them and it was not always the monetary part that mattered. The community counselors provided counsel by

• handling the bereaved through supportive interaction,
• handling the children through play, and interactive and creative activities such as enacting plays, composing poems, singing songs, dancing and music etc. with the themes of “goodness of nature”, “tsunami is transient”, “we shall overcome” etc.
• public education and awareness of the nature of the tsunami
• problem solving and supportive activities

The follow-up meetings have shown that the training produces efficient and expeditious results. The referral pattern was good and it was observed that the community counselors developed culturally appropriate interventions that were effective and methodologically diverse for every group. These have been documented as case studies. The trained volunteer community counselors helped to provide structure and calm in the midst of the chaos in the aftermath of the Tsunami.

The methods used among the adult population were case specific, innovative and adaptive such as:

• the ten-year-old boy who was brought out of his grief (for the six-year-old sister snatched from his hands by the Tsunami) by being asked to mother a plant.
• systematic desensitization of the fear of the sea by regular visits to the backwaters for a bath
• diverting attention from the tragedy by engaging the affected person in activity to restore normalcy to life.

The examples of cases referred to professionals were also indicative of the confidence of the community counsellors–both in the counselling process and in realizing their own limitations

The design of the program and the associated advantages of the model were many including:

• Less dependence on experts
• Cost effectiveness
• Ensured local community participation
• Ready entry points with the additional benefits of shorter time frames, easier
• Identification of needs, easy rapport, and effective communication,
• Enhanced stature of the community counselors in the affected communities due to their continued presence and participation in recovery and reconstruction activities.