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Community healing training programmes
Heal Zimbabwe Trust
July 13, 2010

Heal Zimbabwe in conjunction with the Institute For Justice and Reconciliation are conducting a community healing training workshop in Harare. The workshop is running from 11th of July to 16th of July 2010. The workshop is targeting 28 community leaders from the countries' 10 provinces.

28 community leaders comprising of gender activists, representatives of farm workers, human rights lawyers, teachers, youth leaders, church leaders and traditional leaders are attending the workshop. The workshop seeks to emphasise the following five key objectives important in community healing:

• Educate participants to gain common understanding of community healing as a key concept and process, which enables communities to function effectively.
• Enable participants to recognise, acknowledge and act upon the need for sustained dialogue through establishment of community healing forums.
• Provide participants with skills and strategies needed to create safe space for sustainable dialogue in community healing.
• Assist participants to understand the role of dialogue when using memory, memorialisation and history as tools for reconciliation in community healing.
• Provide and explore a basic implementation plan in order to facilitate sustained dialogue according to community healing principles within their communities.

The training workshop will incorporate best practices towards achieving national healing. For community healing to succeed, facilitators have to deal with emotions, allowing people to open up and share their experiences. Taking a leaf from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) exercise, the community leaders are being offered an opportunity to go through some experiences that South Africans went through after the Apartheid era. South Africa's TRC is regarded as one of the most successful transitional mechanisms in the world.

The training workshop is the first of a series of community healing trainings that Heal Zimbabwe in collaboration with the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation seeks to carry out as it input to the broader national healing process. The first sessions have already indicated that community healing is an enduring process, it is not an event but a process which takes time and it is the responsibility of the broader community to spearhead the process.

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