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HL18
SELF-DETERMINATION
KNOWING HOW TO ACCOMPANY

KNOWING HOW TO ACCOMPANY

In the Humanitarian Corridors program, accompaniment is understood to encompass the set of actions that social workers and host communities do to assist the beneficiaries. The beneficiaries are accompanied for at least one year in ways touching on several areas of life:
Legal assistance for obtaining official identification, health insurance cards, and so on
Assistance entering the social context, particularly concerning work and education
Assistance obtaining medical and psychological healthcare
All these forms of accompaniment flow toward a single, broader objective: support for the person, with their limitations and potential, capacities and abilities, by providing accompaniment along the path of a new life.
Where accompaniment was successful, this study identified a common factor: it was founded on trust, given and received by all the actors involved: refugees, host communities, and social workers. The refugees recognized this where it occurred:
"I’m doing great – they take care of me better than a mother, better than a sister – and not just me, but my kids, too."
"I’ve reached a safe place, where all the neighbors help me to take care of my kids, and of myself."
When one of the parties refused to trust another, the accompaniment was not fully successful. A psychologist involved with the program gave this account:
"Both I and the mediator tried. [What we heard from the beneficiary] was full of contradictions and resistance. We couldn’t even tell if what she was telling us was true, or if some of it was fabricated. She has a great deal of underlying mistrust, which is understandable, because the countries where many of these refugees come from, and the backgrounds they have, justifies a certain degree of suspicion and lack of trust. But this attitude doesn’t make the work easier, and has a negative impact on the quality of the outcome. We had to get involved many times, to explain that we were here to help her – her view was that we were there to attack her, and criticize her way of parenting.
The accounts of two refugees shed light on the perspective of people who did not experience accompaniment:
"I live up here. We don’t do anything; we don’t leave the house. They told me that, if there is no one to look after my son, I can’t go to school. [My son] goes to school in the morning, but it’s not going well. The teachers complain, and he’s not happy about it either – he doesn’t speak the language yet, and he has trouble understanding."
A second form of accompaniment is also necessary: the accompaniment of the social workers and volunteers. They must, in turn, be accompanied in order to understand the meaning of hospitality. This has taken the following shape:
Preparing them to welcome the refugees by: explaining the family, social, and lifestyle contexts the refugees are coming from, together with family roles and the various forms of trauma that may come up
Preparing them to accept the refugees’ freedom: preparing them for the fact that the refugees may refuse to trust them and may, ultimately, choose to leave
In the words of one Caritas social worker:
"The way Caritas works isn’t by simply giving you money or food. It seeks to accompany you on a path toward independence. […] Lots of these paths end in dead-ends. […] In your head it seems clear that this is the right path for you, that you have to take certain steps, and I’ll help you with this and that, but then the reality turns out to be different […] The people [we help] have to put something in, too, and some don’t want to do that […] And we tend to load them up with expectations that are really just us projecting […] But when you work with Caritas, you always have to be open both to the possibility of failure and to the frustration that you can feel as a result."
The dioceses that prepared their people in this way had better outcomes in terms of refugees remaining at least until the end of the yearlong project, if not longer, and with more successful social integration. And they were also better able to handle the reactions of volunteers when refugees chose to leave.
Dioceses that did not prepare their people experienced more difficult rapports with refugees and higher levels of refugee departures and of negative reactions in the host communities.

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