Re-authoring Confinement: Inspirational Sparkling Moments in Everyday Life

A number of communities have been getting together to share their wisdoms and create collective documents with each other.  Please contact us if you’ve been using collective practices to bring together communities remotely during confinement.

This hope document is a collective that was created by over 60 people in a gathering that was hosted by Ummeed Child Development Center, Mumbai. The monthly gathering is a space for individuals to explore narrative practices and come together as a community to support each other in their journey of the practices. The April gathering happened over a Zoom owing to the covid-19 situation and we got together to explore what wellbeing and hope looks like to us in these times. Over conversations, reflections and silences, the participants located hope in its little-big acts of resistance, in metaphors of nature and in acts of solidarity, in picture-books and poetry verses, in music and acts of care. These conversations of hope were parallelly coming alive through illustrations and each of them sought to weave in their hope into the collective. The collective document is a testimony to people’s acts of response and resistance to the current distress, their acts of collective care and continuing to access hope for the coming days.

Narrative Practices India and the Mental Health Team, Ummeed Child Development Center, Mumbai

Special lock down tree of life for children and family (1)Special Lockdown Tree of Life for Children & Families: Bordeaux, France

Narrative Group Project: Exploring Different Responses to Covid-19 from Turkey

Narrative Grup Projesi: Corona Virüs Sürecinde Farklı Baş Etme Yolları

This project was done in response to the effects of the Covid-19 process. As a group of psychologists in İbn Haldun University in Turkey, we wanted to explore our skills, knowledges and values that help us to endure in the process of pandemic. In these group works, we talked about the effects of the difficulties we experience (uncertainty of the future, anxiety of losing our loved ones and feelings of loneliness) and the values, hopes, dreams, skills and knowledges that sustain us in these days. The project was initiated by a narrative practitioner İclal Eskioğlu Aydın and done with the master students in clinical psychology in İbn Haldun University.

We hope our stories will resonate with you and evoke your own stories related to sustaining in this process. We hope to contribute to thicken our stories of surviving and feel connected to each other in order to remember that we are not alone! There are four collective documents below. They are prepared in different forms: one of them is a poem, one of them is a video, the other one is a formula, and one of them contains small paragraphs. We believe that there are several ways to share our stories. You may find one or more of them closer to your own preferences and interests. At the end of each document there are some questions that open up enabling contributions. You can contribute to this project by responding to these questions and sharing your ideas and feelings with us. We really hope to hear from you!

The people who prepared these documents: Sevgi Kurmanç Boyacı, Elif Eren, Merve Aras, Merve Çelik, Betül Sağlam, Aslıhan Ataman, Gülnur Çelik, Esra Öztürk, Feyza Öz, Ayşe Nur Doğan, Esra Özsoy, Hanife Merve Çatan, Dilruba Sönmez, Amine Kübra Çalık, Esma Duman, Merve Sancaktar, Muhammed Furkan Cinisli, Ayşe Ceren Kaban

The editor of these documents: İclal Eskioğlu Aydın

Photographer: Esra Çiçek

Check out these fundraising events and projects.  Our friends in Mumbai, Mexico & Nepal are offering training events to raise funds for those affected by the lockdown. In addition, Gene Combs started a fundraiser to feed families in Rwanda. Please contact us with your fundraising projects and we will share them here!