Donations Training Schedule Our Accomplishments How to Help HAP Store Discussion Groups Research Findings Press HAP WHN Newsletter Volunteer Newsletter Contact Information: Mailing Address: EMDR HAP 2911 Dixwell Avenue, Ste. 201 Hamden, CT 06518 Phone: (203) 288-4450 Fax: (203) 288-4060 Email EMDR HAP Continuing Education Info:
		Read about EMDR accomplishments. Make a donation to assist us in our Efforts.

What's Happening at EMDR HAP Please note that additional news on EMDR HAP can be found in previous editions of the HAP Newsletter HAP in Haiti: First Encounters and Future Plans Thanks to an energetic response from donors, HAP was able to send two seasoned disaster responders into Haiti in late February, where they treated over 100 children in an orphanage near Port au Prince, using the group process for children. They also assessed the potential for training Haitian therapists and made some promising contacts. At this point, we are working toward a first sequence of Basic EMDR training for Haitian psychologists in the later part of April. We thank all donors whose generosity has made this possible. We also know that more than a single round of training (Parts I and II) will be needed, so our quest for funds earmarked for Haiti continues. Vivian Lamphear, PhD from California and Roger Ludwig, MA from Cheyenne, were HAP’s first emissaries. Vivian has spent many years in Haiti working as a researcher and EMDR clinician with numerous church communities and church-related social services. Vivian has returned on a second trip to work with additional church communities and to do important groundwork for setting up EMDR training. And Roger has written a moving first-person account that will engage all EMDR clinicians. “The dignity, pride and faith of the Haitians sustains them. They astound me.” By Roger Ludwig, MA Ména Sophonie died three weeks and three days after the Haitian earthquake. She was nine years old. Yet unlike the estimated 215,000 killed in the fourteen second crush of falling ruble, nothing fell on pretty Sophonie. She suffered no injury. Psychologist Vivian Lamphear and I sat on a pew in the Eglise de Jésus Christ, attending her funeral. Just a few hours before, Bishop Chervil asked us to treat Sophonie’s young mother. She was bent at the waist, holding herself in anguish. Dressed for the funeral, she was wearing a soft white blouse and a long dark striped skirt, her braided hair tied back. Through an interpreter we sought to provide a little stabilization so she could participate in her only daughter’s memorial. Rarely have I felt so helpless. Now she was just a few pews ahead, moaning. Her brother stood in front of her, cradling her against his slim belly, gently rocking, muffling her cries in the folds of his white shirt. The voice of the preacher echoed from the speakers, his Creole booming in my left ear as Charles Anel interpreted into my right. From what I could make out, Sophonie was always first or second in her class at school, a good girl who loved her little brother. The mourners, family and friends, were somber. Neatly dressed, also in black and white, finely coifed, not a simple act since most, if not all of them, are sleeping out of doors under a ragged canopy of tarps or bed sheets, or simply under the sky. The previous night a surprise rain unleashed a torrent sending everyone scrambling for cover. It lasted from 3:00 to 5:00 am. The dignity, pride and faith of the Haitians sustains them. They astound me. Since the quake little Sophonie had barely slept and wouldn’t eat. Her best friend and constant companion had been killed, as had three of her teachers. Her distraught mother had taken her to an emergency aid hospital. Not able to do anything for her, she was sent to another. They couldn’t get her to eat either. As the pastor’s voice boomed, Anel spoke into my ear. In his simple, musical English he translated. “Sophonie had died of fright.” Had she really died of Acute Stress Disorder? There were complicating factors certainly. She had “a weak heart” we were told. Poor nutrition is universal. But the stress response, sustained over three weeks, was more than this delicate child’s body could endure. She died in hospital two days before Vivian and I arrived. EMDR HAP had sent us to assess the severity of Acute Stress Disorder and to treat the children of her Carrefour community. If the aid hospital was like others we became acquainted with, there was no psych staff on their team; no one there was trained to quiet her nervous system. In the three days prior to the funeral we had tested 118 children, ages six to eighteen, using the Child‘s Reaction to Traumatic Events Scale, Revised (CRTES-R). Their scores were high, as expected. The day before we had arranged for the children and adults we were working with to be fed, then selected them by randomized lists for treatment by the EMDR Integrated Group Treatment Protocol, which includes the butterfly hug method of bilateral tapping, or for control treatment which included all the elements except the EMDR. Our treatment had some promising results. Now, among the tag team of preachers, another took the podium. He was reminding us that Sophone was in heaven, that life was short and that we would stand before our creator some day. What would we make of the brief time we had yet to live? As I was considering that question the staccato crescendo of a drum set startled me. Trumpets blared a jazzy out-of-tune rendition of Auld Lang Syne, reminiscent of a New Orleans march from the graveyard. The mourners rose, shuffling, and accompanied Sophonie’s gold casket down the aisle and out the church door. They looked tired and so very weary. Her young mother wasn’t ready. When the casket went by she cried out, keening, wailing, her back arching painfully. Only the supporting arms of her family held her from falling. Her cries pierced my heart. In five days I had seen blocks upon blocks of fallen or cantilevered homes and business, extending for miles. Hillsides of deserted shanties sliding into ravines. I had walked through some of the large tent cities where thousands were striving to survive, to eat and work and bathe midst the mud, urine and smoke of burning rubbish and plastic. Vivian and I stood and gaped at the mound of concrete debris where 5,000 nursing students had been killed and buried in fourteen seconds of rocking thunder. Some of Haiti’s best and brightest, along with their teachers. We had touched, teased and photographed more than a hundred beautiful gentle children who were so quiet and well behaved only because they were too hungry to expend energy playing. But it was this mother’s cries that reached deep. The first tears welled. I glanced over Anel to see Vivian. One formed and slid down her cheek. Compassion, I suppose, touches the depths most powerfully where one life meets another. Now I type, 2,000 miles away from Haiti‘s heat, looking out the window as snow falls against Wyoming’s grey sky and leafless trees. I feel the tears anew. Is it too much to imagine a day where medical teams include counselors who are trained and capable of bringing peace to traumatic shock? Is it time to challenge the conventional wisdom that says that the mind should wait until the body is cared for? Isn’t Post-traumatic Stress a physical condition? Aren’t mind and body one? Is it too big a dream to picture teams of lay people guiding groups of children in a treatment protocol that can quiet their sympathetic nervous system, allowing them to sleep and eat? Can groups of adults be led in a desensitization procedure by trained para-professionals that will settle their minds and bodies, giving them the clarity to rebuild their lives? Are the methods available to do so? I think they are. Yet conventional psychology says no, that the best we can do is to provide education and normalization of symptoms. Do we expect them to become comfortable with knowledge while their body runs riot? Traditional critical incident stress management methods support the maintenance of community but have been shown to fail in the prevention of PTSD. Can we do more than “manage” stress symptoms? Can we reduce them? I think so. After I left Haiti to return to my practice, Vivian joined a medical team making the first visit to a rural, mountainous area near the epicenter. Triage nurses identified the complaints of the two hundred or so gathered. Headaches, insomnia and anxiety were the most common. They had not had these maladies before the earthquake. They were given meds. The nurses didn’t quite know what to make of a trauma psychologist. Can you envision a time when that will change? Vivian was able to elbow her way in to conduct a number of groups. The next day, she retuned to Carrefour to provide the EMDR Integrated Treatment Protocol to the control children and to supervise the testing of all of the children who had come back. A week afterward our Haitian team conducted a third administration of the CRTES-R. It began with a sound, far out to sea, racing through the land into the mountains, like a helicopter, but faster. Suddenly, with the roar of an enormous storm, the ground jerked to the left, and then right, then rose straight up, then plunged back down, stopping higher than it had been. Billowing clouds of dust plumed high into the sky as buildings collapsed. That’s the description of the quake as Bishop Chervil, our sponsor in Carrefour, experienced it. I don’t expect any earthquakes in the helping community. But Vivian and I do hope that our study, conducted under the most extreme circumstances, among children who are orphans or homeless, through translation, may supplement the hard work of those of us who have labored in Mexico, Guatemala and South America, Sri Lanka, Israel, Gaza and in other natural and human disasters to demonstrate one thing. Effective methods do exist. Traveling through the blaring, lurching grid-lock of Port-au-Prince where five miles travel can take two hours we sat in the comfortable shade of Dr. Jean Chéry’s patio. A professor of psychology at the University of Haiti, trained in Montreal, we recognized a kindred spirit. He expressed his eagerness to have EMDR HAP bring training in traumatology and EMDR to the psychologists in the country along with his graduate students. For Haiti, it’s a start. Contributions can be made online or by check to "EMDR HAP" and designated for the Haiti Recovery Project. (Under "Donation Information," be sure to choose "Please use my donation for Haiti Recovery Project.") Read more about EMDR HAP Haiti Recovery Project