Local art therapist helps Bosnians to heal
Teachers, pupils in war-torn town learn creative ways of coping
BY ALLISON BRUCE of The Post and Courier Staff
July 5, 2001
In Gorazde, bullet-riddled buildings line the streets. The town, located in eastern Bosnia, is struggling to regain normalcy in the aftermath of war.
There are small signs of healing. The local school has flowers inside and out, and restored buildings are painted in bright purples, oranges, and pink.
Charleston art therapist and high school art teacher Dianne Tennyson traveled to Bosnia this summer to continue that healing through art therapy with teachers and children.
Tennyson and three other art therapists went with a team of 30 people, including about 10 teen-age assistants and 10 interpreters. Their trip was organized by the Atlanta based ArtReach Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on helping the war-torn area through art therapy. This was the second year of the five-year project.
Art therapy uses art to allow people to express their emotions and deal with difficult subjects. It’s not about pretty picture, Tennyson said, it’s about expressing and solving problems while people more about themselves.
“It’s an excellent way to communicate without having to talk about it,” Tennyson said. “A lot of subconscious and unconscious things come out in art work that you’re not aware of.” It allows healing through creativity, she said.
Tennyson said some of the Bosnian teachers told her they didn’t understand why they needed to keep bringing up the war that ripped their country apart from 1992 to 1995. They just wanted to forget it.
After working with the teachers, she could understand why. But she also knew they needed to work through the horrors that befell them if they ever wanted to heal their community.
“I was just shocked to see all the devastation. There was probably not one family that didn’t have a death from the war,” she said.
What was formerly the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina is now a single state under the independent Serb Republic and Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the heart of what was once Yugoslavia, the area has always been a mixture of Serb, Croat, and Muslin ethnic groups.
The war that followed Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Declaration of independence from the Socialist federal Republic of Yugoslavia helped give the world a horrific new term for genocide: “ethnic cleansing.”
By its end, more than 250,000 Bosnians had been killed, more than 1 million left the country and another 800,000 became refugees.
As one exercise, Tennyson asked the 16 teachers to create drawing of the most intense images they could recall from the war. After they completed the drawings, the group looked at the first two drawings and talked about the emotions and images they conjured up. The first two drawings were so intense the teachers needed a smoking break to recover their nerves.
The group then looked at the next two drawings and had to take another break. After two more drawings, they teachers told Tennyson that they couldn’t handle any more.
“Everyone was crying during the session. So was she.
The teachers did many of the projects they repeated with the 32 students so they could understand how the project made them feel before asking the children to do it. After the teachers had such a hard time with discussing the war images, Tennyson decided to do something else for the children.
The children were asked to divide a piece of paper in half and draw a happy time and a sad time. Happy times included the births of baby brothers and arrival of United Nations troops to secure Gorazde from the constant Serbian shelling. Sad times included the deaths of family members, burning homes and gunfire. One little boy who had lost his mother drew a picture of children during their art therapy class as a happy time and a picture of the ArtReach group leaving as a sad time.
As art therapy was help9ing those children, Tennyson said it could also benefit children in Charleston County. In Miami, every school has an art therapist, she said.
A registered art therapist with more than 2,000 clinical hours under her belt, Tennyson worked with substance-abuse and psychiatric patients at Fenwick Hall Hospital. When the hospital closed in 1994, she found that there was little knowledge of art therapy in Charleston County. She turned to teaching because she could not find a position as an art therapist. She teaches art at James Island High School and does art therapy with a cancer group at Roper Hospital.
Tennyson plans to return to Bosnia with ArtReach next year and may bring one of her daughters along next time
As war-torn and battered as the country is, Tennyson can sense hope.
She recalls one little girl who without warning, started to sing in class. Before she knew it, the rest of the class had joined in to sing with her. “The thing that amazed me the most was their hope for the future,” she said.
Allison Bruce covers the Charleston County School District. Contact her at abruce@postandcourier.com or 937-5546
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