Alumni Profiles

Healing Power
Music helps young women in Uganda traumatized by war


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Abigail McNamara '10 was struck by the vacant looks in the eyes of the young women as they stepped off the bus. Fresh from the front lines of Uganda's civil war, they had gone through unimaginable ordeals: some had been forced into combat, others had witnessed the murders of family members, and still others had borne children conceived as a result of rape. Now they were being offered an opportunity to begin trying to overcome the horrors of the past. The 32 girls and young women, ages 14 to 26, would spend the next 18 months in a residential rehabilitation center in Lukome, Uganda, established by a Durham-based global Christian organization, ChildVoice International. Here they would receive spiritual and emotional counseling, remedial education and vocational and life skills training to help rebuild their lives.

With each new group of women, there was much silence during the first few days and months, says McNamara. But slowly, after time spent in group and individual counseling, they joined in the community drumming circles and singing and crafts projects offered as "healing power and rehabilitation tools" of the expressive arts therapy curriculum taught by people like McNamara, a music education graduate.

The singing helps the young women heal. "Some of them were weapons experts and some had to kill members of their own family," says McNamara, talking via Skype from her mud hut in Uganda. "It's a long process, and one that continues even after they leave our center, but it's an amazing process of recovery." To supplement its fundraising, the organization sells colorful recycled paper bead necklaces and bracelets, made by women in northern Uganda, at the Out Back in Durham and online.

McNamara—who once thought conducting a high school band was her destiny—believes she has discovered her life's work. During three internships and work with the "Restoring the Voices of Children Silenced by the War" project, she has seen women offered hope, often for the first time. "One girl was abducted at the age of 7 and given as a wife to a top commander," McNamara says. "She lived in the bush a long time. When she came to our program she was very angry, upset and not accepting of others. Now she's graduated, married and has had another child. She came to one of the counselors one day and said, 'Madame, I have been blessed because of the gifts I was given here. Every day I am thankful that you came into my life,'" McNamara says.

McNamara plans to keep returning to Uganda. "There's always a sense of emotional exhaustion," she says. "But these girls have hope. If they have hope, why shouldn't I have hope?"

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