Nikki Gamer: Hi everyone. This is Nikki Gamer for Catholic Relief Services, and welcome back to Behind the Story. It’s a podcast series that invites you to celebrate the people behind 75 years of our history, the people we serve, our partners, our staff, and especially the supporters, like you, who make our work possible. In our last episode, we spoke to Dr. Shannon Senefeld and Sister Pauline Acayo about the right of every child to laugh, and to learn and to grow, and about how important play is to every child’s development. So today we’ll be having a conversation with Caroline Brennan, who is our emergency communications director. And she’s going to talk about the work we’re doing to help some of the most vulnerable children on Earth … the resilient ones facing and fleeing violence in their villages and homeland. Welcome Caroline, thank you so much for joining us.

Caroline Brennan: Thanks so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

Nikki Gamer: So, I want to get right into it. You know, you have been to places that are in such crisis. You know, you’ve been to countries next to Syria, tied to the Syrian refugee crisis …

Caroline Brennan: For many families that I’ve met, I’ve heard very similar accounts of how they fled. Many people describe fleeing during a moment of an attack of some sort, either on their city or their town, or even directly into their home from overhead, from the sound of bombs coming from planes, or even through their front door.

Caroline Brennan: And in those moments the husbands turning to the wives and saying, “Take the kids and run.” Usually hopeful and thinking that they’ll be going back when things calm down. And here we are 7 years into the Syrian crisis, and many people haven’t been able to go back and what they often talk about is what and who they left behind.

Caroline Brennan: You know, it’s so interesting in my conversations with so many families, almost without fail, one of the first things that they want to tell you about is the house that they had before and the number of rooms that they had and the garden they had, and this life that they lived before.

Caroline Brennan: It’s so important for me to convey that I get it, that this madness swirling around them does not define who they are. And as one woman said to me, you know, going on this raft, I would never have put my child on this raft unless it wasn’t safer than where we were coming from.

Nikki Gamer: You know, on a related note, so many of our listeners probably haven’t been to where you’ve been and just read about things like the Syrian refugee crisis in the news. Can you tell us what that experience is like versus what it might be like for us, when we read about these things in the news?

Caroline Brennan: People who are waking up far from their homes, not knowing what options await them and just struggling to keep their family safe and a semblance of stability and protection. Not only just the experience of interacting with individuals and hearing their story, but just visually. You know, we see and hear about war in a very physical sense. You see the destruction of buildings, you see ghost towns that were once vibrant cities. In Jordan alone, women and children make up more than 70% of the refugee population. As a woman visitor, it’s actually an advantage because I have access to women. I can hear what they have to say.

Nikki Gamer: Yeah, I want to emphasize that point—I mean, you make an important one. We see in the news, you know, people here in the U.S. are so afraid of refugees, but the reality is a lot of these refugees are women and children, they’re not scary people who are coming to these other countries because they want to destroy and destruct.

Caroline Brennan: Nobody wants to leave their home, especially in a situation where you’re leaving your loved ones behind or maybe something truly horrific has happened to them in front of you. You are just doing your best, with the circumstances you have, to keep the people you love most in this world safe. This is not a first choice. It’s a Hail Mary pass for so many families that I meet.

Nikki Gamer: You know, you and I, we’ve both met Syrian refugee families. And I remember in Jordan, a woman told that her kids, you know, when they would hear a plane overhead, they would immediately start crying, and I know you’ve heard the same things from parents.

Caroline Brennan: What we see in so many children who are arriving in the centers where we’re providing support is that many have simply just regressed in your basic milestones. So they may be wetting the bed again, even if they’re 10 years old. Many of them have simply stopped communicating—they just don’t talk. We know that for children to grow healthfully, just like a plant needs water and air, children need some basic pillars of their foundation. They need a trusted adult in their lives. They need to feel safe, they need to have peers, some of that social engagement. We see children coloring pictures and images of things they experienced and clearly witnessed as they struggle to express themselves. So we know that as responders, we have to look at the full needs of children to be able to help them heal not only in their physical environment, but to heal those wounds far beneath the surface.

Nikki Gamer: When you say drawing pictures of what they’ve experienced, can you just be a little bit more specific?

Caroline Brennan: You see, these are very young children, who draw these pictures in color. You see body parts strewn about, you see lots of teardrops falling from a young child who’s standing nearby. You see what are clearly planes overhead and bombs dropping. These are children expressing something they’ve gone through and have seen. It’s so sad and devastating.

Nikki Gamer: This is a perfect segue into the great work that CRS does with children, and I would love for you to talk about how CRS addresses, you know, some of this trauma.

Caroline Brennan: If you’re 7 or 8 years old and you’re from Syria, all you’ve known is war at this point. Many children have missed years of school. They lose that sense of identity really of what they’re supposed to be in their family and their community, and also that engagement with children in that sense of play. So you want to create all of those aspects just to get to that sense ultimately of normalcy and a healthy foundation to be able to grow again rather than regress, but to be able to recover and move forward. We know they can become extremely healthy, contributing adults in their societies later in life. We really are working with our local partners in these neighboring countries to help refugee children have access to education.

Caroline Brennan: What we do is we offer these safe spaces. So again, you’re offering a place of safety for children—we call them child-friendly spaces. We have skilled teachers and counselors in these spaces, and we provide support to help children catch up to their education level and stay current if they need tutoring, if they’re already at their grade level in the local schools. But what’s a critical component of this is the emotional care and support. If you are a child who’s suffering from extreme distress or even showing signs of trauma, you are not going to be in a position to learn math and we know that.

Nikki Gamer: I want to go back to the child, the idea of the child-friendly space, because I’ve been to some child-friendly spaces in places like Iraq and you don’t expect to see laughing and, and happiness in a place of such … what you would think would be sorrow. Can you take us there?

Caroline Brennan: It’s incredible. They’re such happy places—and for people who are trying to visualize what it looks like—if you imagine a large rectangular tent, that can fit the size of two classrooms really and very decorated. So the children decorate the walls and they set the rules. So you know, no fighting, every story that they read to each other has to have a happy ending. That’s very important for many children.

Caroline Brennan: And you have the teachers, many of whom are refugees themselves. Counselors in the room. And a lot of the activities—in addition to the education and emotional counseling support—are physical because so many of the children are living in a really tight space and they don’t have a chance to move. It’s a very happy place where parents or mothers, if they’re on their own, know they can send their children and they’re safe. Sometimes it’s using puppets to teach about hygiene in areas where there’s a cholera outbreak, and the use of puppets helps children learn behaviors that they might not absorb as quickly or as interestingly, you know, if the puppets weren’t there.

Nikki Gamer: I just remember meeting a mother, a Syrian mother in Jordan who said that the best part of her son’s day was taking the bus that we provided to get him from his home to the class. I said, “Wow, why? Why does he like the bus so much?” She’s like, because that’s what he remembers he used to do and it makes them feel like all the other kids in the world again.

Caroline Brennan: Right. Right. He’s got connection to the life that they had before. We’re often unfortunately meeting people in their darkest moment, when everything has been stripped away from them. And it’s really stunning how people show themselves to you and what they’re holding onto, which might just be their sense of self and their