Healing wounds with hugs and tender loving care

By Zhang Haizhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-25 10:42

The counselor himself was being comforted by a teenager who had lost his mother and his arm in last year's quake. The young Chinese's empathy with his older American counselor - who is briefly overcome by yet another horrible story - reveals the close bond Randy Simmon has developed with local people of Mianyang.

He speaks little Chinese and they little English, but language poses no barrier to the popular mental health counselor in Beichuan Middle School.

The quake razed the school, killing more than 1,000 students and 40 teachers, and leaving about 70 disabled.

Simmon, 53, came to the school last November and ever since has been working as a volunteer in a counseling center set up by Professor Gao Lin, 43, a psychologist from the Guangzhou-based South China Normal University.

Currently, the center occupies three offices in a row of pre-fabricated houses. On the walls are several wish lists. One student says he would like to work hard and go on to study civil engineering in college so that he can help build stronger houses in the future. Another has written about how much he misses his parents and how he wishes the quake never happened.

Gao says roughly 100 students, on average, visit for help. Gao and Simmon are joined by six volunteers, all of whom are graduates or post-graduate students of psychology. Simmon is the only foreigner, something that gives him an edge, he says.

Americans are comfortable with using body language such as touching and hugging, he explains. Small gestures such as patting the students on the shoulder or holding their hands, helps. "If I want to get close to them, I just touch them," he says.

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Although he is not a psychology graduate, Simmon feels his rich experience in teaching is a boon. Before coming to the Beichuan Middle School, Simmon had been working for six years as an English teacher in a high school in Chengdu. Before that, he was a high school teacher for 12 years in Missouri.

He says he tries his best every day to spend as much time as possible with the distressed youngsters, especially those left handicapped by the quake. The students need somebody to confide in, Simmon says. "They need a release." Staying with them gives them this channel.

But it also means he and his team have to listen to many sad stories, which can be quite frustrating. When this happens, Simmon and Gao sit down together and talk. On occasion, says Simmon, he breaks down.

He found himself in tears on May 11, one day before the quake's first anniversary, after chatting with a teenager who had had an arm amputated.

At lunchtime that day, the 18-year-old told Simmon he was going back with his father to Beichuan to see his mother the following day.

Simmon was initially pleased for the youngster until he realized that the teen's mother had died in the disaster. "I thought he was visiting his mother's grave." But that was wrong. On the day the quake hit, the boy said, he and his father saw his mother getting buried underneath the rubble but were unable to retrieve her body. Father and son were returning to gaze upon a pile of rubble, the only memorial to a woman they both adored.

Simmon says he was so overcome with emotion at the awfulness of the situation that he had to rush out, crying. When he came back to the dining hall, the student was the one comforting him. He put his palm gently on Simmon's ankle and said: "Don't be too sad. It's okay."

After a year on the campus, he is seeing more such evidence of the youngsters being able to deal with their trauma. Happiness and laughter have now returned, thanks to the hard work of the counselors.

The new Beichuan Middle School will be completed in a year and students should be able to move there in autumn 2010.