Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Can Telling a Story Heal the Hurt?

By Soeung Sophat, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
02 March 2010

The simple act of telling a story could be one way of healing trauma. At least that’s what Poeuv Socheata, a Cambodian-American who is gathering the stories of many of her countrymen, thinks. And not just for an individual, but for an entire community.
Poeuv Socheata, who is 29, runs a program through Yale University to collect narratives from Cambodian survivors, and she said this has taught her the power of a story.
“I interviewed one older gentleman who was a survivor [and] who said the one thing that kept him going during the Khmer Rouge time was this idea that he would survive and then he would tell the world about what happened,” she told VOA Khmer in a recent interview. “That it was essential for him to tell the world. I think there are more and more people like him.”

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