U.S. Army Grief Counselors Helping Kenyans to Help Themselves

U.S. soldiers in jungle fatigues and crew cuts are counseling the counselors who will attend to Kenya’s mental and emotional recovery from a terrorist attack that took at least 218 lives here.

The members of the Combat Stress Control Team are among the Army medical personnel deployed to Kenya in the aftermath of the bombing of the U.S. Embassy on Friday. Their first job is to listen to the horror stories of nurses, social workers and psychologists, and then to teach them to go out and take care of the rest of the grieving country.

“You will have feelings when you hear them talk about the bombing,” Capt. Erin Wilkinson warned a group of counselors at Nairobi’s Kenyatta Hospital on Tuesday. “The more you can talk about it here, the more you will be able to listen to it.”

Neither talking nor listening came easily to the 20 mental health workers who had lived through the same trauma as those they were about to console. They cried openly as they remembered the last few days.

And the Americans, who know a lot about psychology but little about Africa, found that they also have a lot to learn about grieving among the 42 tribes of Kenya. They had worked with U.S. soldiers in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Saudi Arabia, but never before with foreigners. “This is our team’s first cross-cultural intervention,” Wilkinson said.

The challenge facing the mental health workers would be a difficult one anywhere, but it is particularly so among people who might believe that the terrorist attack was brought about by their own misdeeds--the failure to perform a ritual, or an offense against an ancestor.

“People look for an explanation for death because in many cultures here death does not ‘just happen,’ ” said Cecilia Rachier, a psychologist at Kenyatta Hospital. “They look for something to blame, something they did, because death is not natural. And they do many things to prevent death, like trying not to annoy the ancestors.”

Kenya has not had to deal with tragedy on such a sudden, massive scale before, and many people who have always relied on their family or clan for support are asking for professional help for the first time, Rachier said. There is a shortage of trained personnel, so the hospitals asked the Americans to help train nurses, social workers, and family and marriage counselors to handle the demand.

Wilkinson and her crew gave the class a model for conducting counseling sessions: Get people to report the facts--what they heard, saw and smelled. Find out what they thought at the time, and then, most important, what they felt.

After four hours of lectures and demonstrations, the Kenyans broke into groups to practice on one another while the Americans watched.

One by one, the professional men and women recalled hearing the blast, the terrible noise it made and the knots that formed in their stomachs as they made mental checklists of their family members who might be downtown.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘My mother, she works there. . . . My brother . . .’ ” said a psychologist who burst into sobs.

The others in her training group fell quiet and pulled out handkerchiefs to dab at tears in their eyes.

Another woman said: “I kept thinking that I could have been there, that it could have been me dead. I ask myself, if I were dead, what would happen to my two children? What would my husband do? Is there anything I have contributed to society?”

Others spoke of their work in emergency rooms Friday, of the unending stream of badly injured people, the smell of so much blood and the frustration as patients died.

“I felt strength,” said Rebecca Waigwa, a nurse. “I realized I had to save lives. I got a lot of energy and found myself working, working until I became weak and had to take a break. Then I got confused, started talking in my mother tongue. I even called a friend by the wrong name, I was so confused and upset.”

By the end of the course, many of the Kenyans were feeling better, more able to take on the burden of other people’s grief. But the Americans warned that the challenge of counseling people who had suffered worse losses would be great.

Rachier, the Kenyan psychologist, added that they would have to adapt the American lessons to varied African cultures.

“Grief isn’t difficult for my tribe, the Luo. We allow ourselves to express it--we wail and cry. But she is a Kikuyu,” Rachier said, pointing to one woman. “They say, ‘Why do the Luos keep on crying?’ ”

The American model encourages people to talk about the dead, to accept death, but tribes such as the Masai stop talking about someone as soon as that person dies.

“You can’t go by the book,” Rachier said. “They have been coping with death this way all their lives. So you try to find out how people cope.”

“How do you know when someone isn’t coping?” Wilkinson asked. “I guess you have to ask.”

She will have many chances to ask. The Americans plan to train 50 more health workers today and to hold similar seminars for as long as they are needed in Nairobi.