Bibi Bulak

Trauma healing and Peace building through theatre in East Timor project.

The East Timorese people have suffered a brutal past. Five hundred years of Portuguese colonisation and twenty-five years of Indonesian repression and control have left their mark on a number of levels. Trauma in people’s lives is all-pervasive, and the current conflict has not only led to an increase in fear and trauma, but it has also been a symptom of it. Since East Timor’s autonomy in 1999 and independence in 2001, there have been a myriad of rehabilitation and development activities with the aim of rebuilding people’s lives and livelihoods after the widespread destruction of infrastructure, killings, violence and looting by the Indonesian backed militias following the referendum. Needless to say human resource development has been integral to recovery and rehabilitation efforts, but the recent tensions illustrate that more needs to be done by development actors to support the long and hard process of trauma recovery.

It is well known that in societies experiencing conflict and post conflict, where people have been brutalised and living in a context of fear and violence, women become particularly vulnerable. Rape and sexual assault of women are used as weapons of war by the perceived ‘enemy’, and women can also become vulnerable to violence by their brutalized menfolk. Furthermore, when populations of people are displaced in camps where there is a pervasive sense of fear and hopelessness, women once again are particularly vulnerable to acts of sexual and physical violence. In this case, East Timor is sadly no exception.

Women, as half the population and in their roles as primary carers of children, the elderly and the community in general, have an important and indispensable role to play in community healing. For this reason, combined with the untold suffering they have experienced, it is crucial that their voices are heard alongside men for trauma healing and community peace building efforts to have real and lasting outcomes for the people of East Timor.

This project addressed issues of trauma for East Timorese women and men displaced by the recent conflict through the medium of theatre performances in the settlement camps in and around Dili as a result of the recent conflict. IWDA, with funding assistance from ANZ, supported the East Timorese Theatre troupe to implement this project. The objectives were to provide:

• Strategies and opportunities to men and women living in the Internally Displaced Peoples (IDP) camps to process and deal with the trauma they have experienced and the ramifications of that trauma,
• A means to empower people living in the camps, particularly women,
  Strategies for peace building from the ground up and to contribute to the reconciliation process,
• Entertainment as a respite against people’s daily struggles and hardships,
  Capacity development of the members of Bibi Bulak and the 6 facilitators in group trauma healing,
• A means and opportunity for youth (ie. all the members of Bibi Bulak) to be involved in the peace building process and demonstrate the positive role that young men and women can play in rebuilding East Timor.

The project was completed in September 2006, with 30 performances carried out by Bibi Bulak. Towards the end, Bibi Bulak had to carry out theatre performances in the districts, as the camps in Dili had become too unsafe for the actors to perform in them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 under East Timor.