Former Eritrean refugees sponsor their own psychologist to fill health-care gap
CBC
Clinical psychologist Samuel Kebede explains PTSD as an “unhinged memory.”
When a person suffers extreme fear, Kebede says the brain can cause that memory to splinter. It becomes inaccessible, as if it’s “scattered in places where it doesn’t belong.”
Then, even when the person is safe — perhaps re-established in Canada, 12,000 kilometres away from the dirt roads where the trauma occurred — they’re still triggering those fragments of broken memory.
Kebede, who is a refugee himself, has seen memories from the violence and precarity of refugee journeys cause flashbacks, panic, depression and sleep problems, and ruin relationships.
A group of Eritrean community members are banding together to try to bring Kebede to Calgary, hoping to help the community of roughly 5,000 people access the kind of support that’s chronically difficult for many newcomers to get in the mainstream health-care system.
Kebede is keen to treat Eritrean refugees in their mother tongue, Tigrinya, helping them patch these memories together in a safe way.
“It seems easy, but it's not easy," he said. "It's not just narrating the situation or telling the story about it.”
But it brings relief.
“It's very successful if it is conducted by an experienced therapist,” he said. “It ... has a nice outcome, and we can observe positive changes in that person right away.”
Kebede fled Eritrea in 2011, when he was 19. He studied psychology in Addis Ababa and has been working with Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia since.
Members of the Eritrean community reached out after a tragedy struck here.
In Calgary, five people have been killed in the last three years at after-hours drinking events in and around International Avenue. All of the victims and known perpetrators were young newcomers from the Eritrean community, and community leaders say the blame, in part, should be laid on untreated trauma.
Community leaders connected with Kebede virtually to help one victim’s family. Then they wrote a job offer, and have been trying to sponsor him through a fast-track Canadian immigration program that combines economic need and refugee status.
“We need this person,” said Syn Amanuel, an immigration consultant and volunteer with the Eritrean Canadian Community Association of Calgary.
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