World Humanitarian Day
Samuel Habimana
In 2015, Samuel Habimana trained as a Community Resiliency Model (CRM)® teacher. In the same year, he founded and is now the executive director of the Rwanda Resilience and Grounding Organization. Mr. Habimana created this organization to help individuals, families, and communities heal from the effects of the Rwandan genocide. After the genocide, rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) surged. Through CRM, Mr. Habimana is able to teach wellness skills accompanied by biological explanations of trauma to build resilience and mitigate the impact of psychological stressors.
Through his organization, Mr. Habimana works with survivors and perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide to help them both heal and reintegrate into their communities. He also works with children of these groups to lessen the effects of intergenerational trauma through the CRM wellness skills to strengthen and grow their resilience.
Mr. Habimana believes that CRM—and more specifically the skills of tracking, resourcing, and grounding—has been the key to helping those in his community restore peace, compassion, and well-being. He described one woman using songs to resource and how the result of this skill empowered her to forgive and even visit former perpetrators of the genocide. In his personal experience, Mr. Habimana notes how CRM has amplified his own resilience and propelled him to be a leader for his family and community:
“Before this training, I did not sleep. I heard noises of people knocking on my door. Sometimes I saw them in my dreams. I woke up in the morning with weakness, fatigue, stress, and a lot of fear. Now, I am able to differentiate the past and present which was very difficult for me in previous years and I am able to tell a positive story to my children and friends which can also help them."
Samuel Habimana continues his work with these communities and, in September of 2021, will go back to school to receive his doctorate degree in social work.
CLICK HERE to learn more about Mr. Habimana’s organization
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Flora Tracy
Flora Tracy received her first Community Resiliency Model (CRM)® training in 2013 in Nairobi. Currently, she is a social worker and counselor who works with the Women Entrepreneurship and Innovation Initiative (WEII), a Community Based Organisation established in February 2016 by a group of rural women activists in the Kitgum District of Northern Uganda. Within this community, Ms. Tracy has trained 139 Village Health Teams (VHTs) in CRM and works with a variety of people that include service providers, community leaders, people with disabilities, youth, and survivors of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV).
Ms. Tracy integrates CRM in every aspect of community engagement whether that's through training, meetings, or activities. It has been especially useful in creating trauma-informed communities in which individuals and groups are able to identify someone who is stuck in a low or high zone and can provide assistance through wellness skills, such as resourcing and grounding, or make referrals to the Health Center, where the individual’s needs can be further addressed. Ms. Tracy believes that the most important aspect of CRM is that it has reinforced hope among the communities in the post-war era and, more recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, amid the Refugee Welfare Council election, Ms. Tracy implemented CRM into a community dialogue in the Palabek Refugee Settlement contributing to the largest number of women elected to leadership.
For Ms. Tracy, CRM has helped her overcome the obstacles in her own life while providing the same hope for those in the Kitgum District. She explains:
“With the traumatic events I experienced in life, I had lost hope in everything. These trainings helped me build hope and I made a promise to help others be trauma-informed so they could also find support. I have trained many people that gained hope in life by use of the CRM skills which have made them take on life positively. These skills helped me gain confidence in my own life, which is why I completed my Bachelor of Counselling Psychology from the University of the Sacred Heart Gulu in Uganda.”
Flora Tracy utilizes CRM daily to help her make informed decisions and maintain balance and she also incorporates CRM into her social life so that others may have the skills to do the same.