UYISENGA NI IMANZI (UNM) is child and youth focused organization aiming to contribute to the family cohesion, and promote economic empowerment of youth with so many different approaches to promote child’s rights and support them through education and reintegration and rehabilitation of street children. UNM had done so much in order to sustain the wellbeing of vulnerable children and youth, where it has been working in child protection sector since 2002. Yet it realized that it not going to be enough until it finds a way to heal emotional wounds, behavior and thought related challenges resulting from hardship situation of all kinds.
This is due to the later growth of mental health conditions among our participants that UNM has developed the idea of art and healing center (psychotherapeutic center) to help not only UNM’s participants but also the Rwandan community which affects the individuals, families and group, it is in that sense that the Country director has been offering psychotherapeutic sessions to the above people as an addition essential service to its social- economic development programs to children and youth.
In fact, that is how the idea of UNM arts healing center with a great project in it designed to address the mental health issues within community, health institutions and schools; increasing awareness and creating healing networks through MAP at home (mobile arts for peace at home).
Furthermore, Uyisenga Ni Imanzi in Partnership with IRDP, have trained around 50 different mental health professionals (clinical psychologist and mental health nurses) from National rehabilitation services(NRS), 5 district hospitals and 13 health centers health service centers. The trainings were intending to improve their knowledge and skills toward arts based therapy and to create healing networks in order to provide better service and better treatments for Rwandan community. In Addition to that, It had given out mobile phones to teen mothers and other participants that are in need of the healing services together with trainings on how to use zoom for effective online sessions, there after the participants had divided into groups and named those groups lovely names ABAMARARUNGU for the teen mothers and ABADAHERANWA for youth former drug addict, IMBERE HEZA for youth survivor of 1994 Genocide against Tutsi, UMUCO for individual living in conflicting families and DUKOMEZANYE for beneficiaries of mental health services on health centers.
Therefore, 80 participants in the above mentioned categories together with variety of facilitators (teachers, psychosocial workers, Master trainers) have attended / will continue to attend the Online healing and educative sessions via zoom conference as well as face to face sessions to practice the designed arts exercises in 12 units under the following services provided at UNM’s healing center
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What a nice article. It keeps me reading more and more!