File:USAID Album 72157647436044136, image 28.jpg

• Description: María* is a participant of the USAID Funded project “ACOPLE: Community-Based Treatment Services for Afro-Colombian Victims of Torture”, implemented by Heartland Alliance International. As part of our aim to provide context-specific, replicable, effective and sustainable community mental health services for 1600 survivors of torture and political violence, project participants are given emotional support through individual and/or group therapy. Sessions are complimented by Art-therapy such as dance-therapy and the use of social and community photography. María was from a village in the jungle of the Colombian Pacific coast, and was internally displaced to one of the bigger towns in the Pacific several years ago. However, she continued to experience feelings of sadness and depression and arrived in the ACOPLE Center looking for emotional support. For the art-therapy exercise, she found and took new photos which represented important moments in her life and narrated to the group part of her story, past and present. The exercise aimed to try and heal some of the emotional wounds that she still continues to live with, despite the passing of the years. The importance of ensuring emotional and mental health of the poor and vulnerable is often overlooked when talking about ending extreme poverty. However, mental and emotional health is essential to ensure the daily functioning of all, and enable people who face conditions of poverty and vulnerability, to advance in their aim to overcome these circumstances and look for new opportunities.

Credit: Heartland Alliance International – Project ACOPLE (Colombia) / Gloria Carolina Barrera Mejía

• Album: 72157647436044136
• Image id: 14796325717
• Image url: 14796325717_11651b1176_o.jpg