How mentalizing started a chicken farm in Rwanda

Stories about the power of psychology often make better sense when told backwards:

Imagine a poor foster mother in rural Rwanda, living off a single cow and a small banana farm. She cares for three of her own three children, three from her brother killed in the Hutu conflict, and three from her sister who died from AIDS. No wonder she sometimes has a short fuse. Now, she cares for this defiant traumatized teenage boy, and they quarrel for years – she scolds him, he runs away and inevitably returns because he has nowhere to go – week after week.

One day she’s invited to join a group of foster mothers from nearby villages by Mimi from SOS Children’s Villages (SOSCV). For six months, they meet every three weeks to follow eight sessions about attachment-based care principles, watch video demonstrations, have group discussions and make their own plans for how to practice care between sessions. After the fourth session (about Mary Main’s principles of how to interact to make children feel secure), she starts mentalizing dialogues with the boy. She finds out that he’s an expert on chicken breeding. Surprise! Together they build a chicken farm, and in no time they are the only family in the village able to buy a Jeep to go to market. Her foster parent group decides on a WhatsApp network to break isolation, and after session seven they even start advising neighbors who have child rearing problems. How did this group training come about?

Turns out that Mimi is just one of 17 SOSCV staff from Rwanda, Zanzibar, Tanzania and Kenya who attended a startup seminar, introducing them to a six-month instructor online class in how to train foster parent groups in attachment-based care. In each module students learn attachment theory, group attachment-based dynamics, how to stimulate infants and how to interact with traumatized children. They also give each other peer feedback after each training of a local group, and they receive a USB drive for use in remote areas, with training programs and videos in English, Swahili and Kinyarwanda, adjusted to local culture. How did this happen?

SOS Children’s Villages and Fairstart Foundation agreed on a two-year partnership to design local staff education and training programs in Swahili and Kinyarwanda. When the electronic pre- and post-registration of 660 children’s development showed an average improvement of 20 percent, SOSCV decided to start the next class, expanding the project to Ethiopia and Somaliland. Readers may ask: If it works so well, shouldn’t it be implemented in more countries?

In similar two-year partnerships, Fairstart has educated 460 instructors from partner NGOs and governments in 26 countries around the globe that now train hundreds of caregivers. Also, 130,000 professionals have visited the training programs on Fairstart’s free site, offering versions of foster and group care training programs in 20 languages.

In 2004 I was run down by a bike and ended up in a wheelchair for a while. Being bored, I decided to write a book about attachment disorder in English, published in 10 languages within a year, which spurred a worldwide tour to lecture and study care systems. I then had the idea of starting a foundation to connect researchers, organizations and frontline staff — an international network of international researchers generously shared their knowledge. This research in epigenetics, brain development, attachment and relations work, group dynamics and organizational theory provided the base for designing the blended learning theory of change, as well as the online education based on the EdX platform from MIT and Harvard, and the topics in the training programs.

Today our small staff of four and our volunteer board work in Africa and for the government of Greenland. Our next partnerships include Spanish, Latin American and Indian organizations.

The project rests on two basic assumptions. First, professionals will be motivated to engage, contribute and implement because we work not just for money, but also search for meaning with what we do – and the sense of meaning can only be produced in human relations. Second: The power of attachment is universal – it works across borders, religions and conflicts when respectfully adjusted to local culture and needs.

Or, as Einstein wrote to his daughter Liesl: “When scientists looked for a unified theory of the universe they forgot the most powerful unseen force. Love is light, that enlightens those who give and receive it. Love is gravity, because it makes some people feel attracted to others. Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness.”

My eternal thanks to caregivers worldwide who join, in spite of being underpaid and unrecognized, and face scores of children traumatized by separations. And thanks as well as to dedicated psychologist colleagues, equally challenged by a lack of resources, nationalism and xenophobia, and prejudice.

Child psychologist Niels Peter Rygaard, PhD, is CEO and cofounder of Fairstart Foundation.

Research and papers can be found online.