A narrative laboratory for healing

On the slopes of La Popa hill, being a child is difficult. The neighborhoods of Pablo VI, Los Comuneros, and La María, with their narrow alleys and crowded houses, are home to hundreds of stories of children who are exposed daily to situations of violence, abuse, and abandonment. Children who, from a very young age, on the banks of the Juan Angola estuary, the most contaminated body of water in Cartagena, must learn to live with a feeling of insecurity inside and outside their homes. According to Legal Medicine, last year 417 girls were victims of alleged sexual crimes in the city of Cartagena.

With few parks and fields, childhood develops amid gang rivalry, drug trafficking, the arrival of people displaced by the armed conflict, and migration between sister countries. But among the territorial tensions, there is a door that opens to a safe place. Where there are books, microphones, cameras, and scripts. There are paintings, costumes, projectors, and puppet theaters. Behind that door, creative expression runs wild so that children can reclaim the play that has always belonged to them.

That door also leads to the consulting room where Yenifer Patrón and Tatiana Patrón, two Afro-Cartagena sisters and psychologists from Narrarte, sit. This organization uses narrative therapy to heal the wounds of abuse in the community. This type of therapy became popular in 1990 and is said to be a legacy of postmodernism, as it explores different ways of explaining the same thing to generate alternative stories where the problem loses prominence in favor of other possible narratives.

This way of externalizing experiences allows the problem itself not to define the person’s identity. It starts with the premise that the child is the greatest expert on their experiences, as they have direct access to their experiences. Together with the therapist, they work as a team to begin weaving the narrative: where the events occurred, in what period of time, who the actors are, what the problem is, what skills they have to overcome the obstacle, and what paths can be taken. This allows the young patient to find diverse solutions to the situations that distress them, making use of their talents.

Yenifer Patrón is the director of Narrarte and the therapist who accompanies this hero’s journey. Ten years ago, she began to offer her services for free to the children of La Popa hill. “In the field of health, there are some imaginary ideas that therapy is not needed, that it solves itself or that it is a thing for the rich. In public schools, there is one psychologist for more than 1,000 students,” says Patrón.

Under this premise, children grow up without facing problems, sometimes feeling that they themselves caused them, deeply affecting their well-being and self-esteem. That’s why Narrarte’s mission is as basic as it is powerful: to help children live their childhood with joy.

Living childhood with joy

What allows pain to become poetry passes through the hands of Carlos Diaz Acevedo, an Afro-Cartagena man, linguist, communicator for development, and audiovisual writer. Carlos grew up in the northeastern part of Cartagena as a young man who participated in organizational processes. In Funsarep, a partner organization of Narrarte, he forged his community leadership. Carlos makes use of his skills in cultural management and gets involved in the stories, proposing formats such as radio and video to find the best rhythm when telling the story.

Carlos Diaz Acevedo at the Narrarte headquarters. Photo: Adriana Abramovits

This narrative laboratory that unites the psychological with the communicative becomes a scenario of help, with professionals who accompany and support groups that sustain. These groups are made up of other children who are experiencing similar situations. This is how everyone becomes a team against these problems, they ally to respond to “the villains” and find a way to transform the endings through play.

That world that mixes reality and fantasy began in 2013 with a children’s reading club in the Los Comuneros neighborhood. They would meet on Saturday mornings. “What does not fit in my world” was the first book they read. With that reading, the children began to talk about what they lived at home, community violence, and bullying. They identified the problems as monsters, trusting that to attack them they had to know them. They answered: what are their names, what feeds them, where do they live, who are their friends. And they personified them, turned them into satire, theater, puppets, and pantomime. That was the beginning of Narrarte.

The stories that emerged later maintained that systemic approach of recognizing tensions in the social and family environment, and involved parents, companions, and caregivers. That gave rise to the campaign: “For a Cartagena at one meter ten. A city at the height of children, girls, and our rights.” This initiative gathered all those complaints and requests from the children to take them to educational institutions, media, and political spaces.

In the elections for council members and aldermen, Narrarte, along with other organizations from the Mesa Local de Infancia Cartagena Mía, presented their list of requests, and the children also committed to being at the height of the care of La Popa, which gives them oxygen, gives them shade, and recognizes them as citizen actors. So asking for play spaces in the Santa Rita neighborhood or a decent sewage system in Pontezuela, could only be accompanied by the two-way commitment to take care of the neighborhood and continue building community.

Luiger de Jesús Mendivi (17 years old) in the Narrarte recording studio. Photo: Adriana Abramovits

Another of Narrarte’s flagship projects is the audiovisual short film “En regla” (On the dot), produced by Colectivo Alas, made up of young women between 16 and 29 years old who are part of Narrarte. In the 10-minute humorous video, they publicly talk about one of the great taboo subjects: menstruation. For Johana Herrera, leader of the Colectivo Alas, if something as awful as feminicides has been normalized, talking about something truly natural, like menstruation, should not be a problem. The staging simulates a courtroom, with a scandalized audience, who point to menstruation as a crime.

Yenifer Patrón, director of Narrarte and Johanna Herrera of Colectivo Alas. Photo: Adriana Abramovits

Narrarte appears as a rescue, as a change of narrative that brings play closer and pushes away the imposition of the adult world. They create a world of their own that is very fun, full of laughter, where even the great masters behave like children. In the midst of a global mental health crisis, which has young people as the main victims, narrative therapy becomes a tool to free people from guilt, to find common ground in individual experiences, to open space for writing and the arts as a universal language. To tell each other differently and be able to find alternative paths. And to apply, as Carlos says, “communication to be happy. And narration so that people do not die.”

(*) Journalist at Dejusticia

This article is part of the special #TejidoVivo, a product of a journalistic alliance between the Dejusticia study center and El Espectador.