By Noura Wafeek Syam

Trauma is a situation that most humanitarian workers, police, military and social and community workers working in the context of humanitarian crisis face. The term ‘trauma’ originates from the Greek trauma (“wound”).

This wound results from what they have seen during their experiences and their work. They witness the atrocities of murder, killing, rape, the humanity in its worst shape, when people decide to give up their humanity and to harm and injure other human being because they are afraid of them, to reach power to overcome their fears.

During my experience in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I saw and interacted with  several people who suffer from trauma because of what they have witnesses personally, or what they have heard and listened to in their line of work: “secondary trauma”. Trauma is a dangerous disease because it kills people in life, it attacks their soul and their inner peace and make us extremely vulnerable to challenges or any minor incident that change the status quote and what we have adopted to.  Thus, it is very important to deal with this trauma and for people to know they have access to this kind of services, and more important self-awareness and motivation that this kind of support will alleviate the pain and the anxiety that we suffer from. Dealing with trauma, especially secondary trauma, most of the time is missing in programing intervention which I believe is a gap that needs to be addressed and special program not to be designed for that purpose only.

https://repository.up.ac.za/bitstream/handle/2263/24870/02chapters3-4.pdf?sequence=3