If we let the youth speak, they will tell the truth
by Shamm H. Petros, Senior Director of Learning and Development at Lion’s Story
Our most radical storytellers are under our care.
Our youth will tell us the unadulterated truth about our realities, especially if we create the container to hold it. The reach of the youth’s voice is directly related to our appetite for discomfort. If we give them truly protected spaces to play and tell their story, we could reshape this world - but that will require us to reshape ourselves first.
Recently, as young adults and college students risk their livelihoods and give up their privilege to lead anti-genocide, Gaza solidarity, and divestment protests in encampments across college campuses in the USA, my body & mind are being teleported to my learnings from working with some of the most subjugated youth across the world.
While I was working in Kenya in 2017 delivering a video game coding intervention for refugee youth that was aimed to support youth in telling their story through play while developing advanced technical skills, I met a 14 year old Ethiopian female participant who was a survivor of many atrocities and found herself pregnant and illiterate.
Prior to the coding experience, she had never opened a computer in her life but somehow illustrated an untapped set of computational and analytical skills to tell her experience of forced marriage. She created a game in which an aggressive bee was in pursuit of a beautiful flower. The player had to usher the power of rain, wind, and fire to deter the bee’s path and protect the flower. She said to me, “This game makes me feel better about my pain and kind of precious even - like a flower”.
What can we learn from our youth, if we are willing to listen? What can racial literacy tell us about the dyadic nature of how the youth shape us and how we shape them?
As an international relief worker, I dedicated years designing and overseeing healing and learning spaces for migrant youth across conflict zones in the Middle East and East Africa. Caring for youth in some of the most challenging socio-political contexts of this world will shatter and reshape anyone’s understanding of what is possible for the future.
When I left my last emergency assignment in the Bidi Bidi refugee camp, along the Ugandan and South Sudanese border, I vowed for my own wellbeing to never return. My mother’s words were on replay like a haunting lullaby. “Why would you go back to the place we worked so hard to escape?” I resented her deeply for that statement. I resented her for not understanding. We made it out, so now we have to go back and help anyone we could. Actually, I resented that she might have been right.
(Shamm Petros visiting a play center in Bidi Bidi refugee camp in Yumbee, Uganda, where three (3) children play with a makeshift ball just three days after fleeing their homes)
There are only a few differences between the person I am and the people I seek to serve. While I found hope and meaning in the eyes of the youth, I couldn't stomach that they will have to live in the scary world we created. I felt disgusted by the carelessness of some of my educated, privileged peers who glamorized the public service work like they were rogue warriors. I felt guilty by the experimentation that international non-profits practiced in pockets of countries that had no governance or oversight. I wondered, “Are we the new colonizers?” These dilemmas kept me from sleeping. I couldn't bear to witness another group of orphaned ten-year olds kids parent their three-year old friend they met along their journey. As demonstrated in the photo above, they still found joy and made meaning of their experiences. How dare I pity them! This is why, as a wellness and learning professional, I'm committed to seeing children as experts of imagination who can reshape our future.
I left the international relief sector to study mental health - a socially acceptable pursuit of hope. How can I make this world hurt less? How could I hurt less? The vicarious trauma ate at me for years and I developed autoimmune conditions that medical doctors couldn't explain or test. When they failed to provide a diagnosis, I wanted to offer “Perpetually Sad Girl Syndrome” or “Diseased from Knowing & Caring”. To say I was burnt out was an understatement. I developed a simmering grudge that filled my chest and threatened to erupt out of my mouth everyday, in class and at work. This grudge was towards my mother for her honesty, towards my former colleagues for their delusions, and towards my American peers for not understanding war or what war birthed overtime in places they will never see.
It was not until I fell upon the work of Jane Juffer, a noted youth migrant activist, that my hopelessness dissolved. Juffer offered me words that helped me understand the violence that migrant children have endured– “I see children as precarious subjects and argue for a distinction between vulnerability and precarity” (Juffer, J. (2016). Can the Children Speak? Precarious Subjects at the US-Mexico Border. Feminist Formations, 28(1), 94–120.).
As I posed in our newsletter last month about the weight of gender, “Am I in danger, or am I the danger?” The same applies for how children, youth, and young adults understand their social power. “Are they in danger or are they the danger we fear?” We know no one can dissolve respectability politics faster than a child crying at a grocery store or a teenager who stretches ever noted social boundaries. Professionals that study human development respect this process of growth but do they respect a child as a full human being or someone who is not yet fully human?
At Lion’s Story, our commitment to the practice of storytelling was birthed by our study of play. Dr. Howard Stevenson, our Interim Executive Director and the founder and leading expert in the research of racial socialization and racial literacy, first built out interventions such as PLAAY. PLAAY centers sport, competition, and physical movement as a means to develop critical consciousness and conflict resolution skills among youth who are closest to violence and demonstrate “aggression”. I learned from PLAAY, that the anger of our youth has critical data about what we need to feel safe and loved in this world. Their anger becomes aggressive when the container can not hold our truth.
Our big secret at Lion’s Story is that storytelling is how we convince adults to play. Play, as in the fearless engagement and rearrangement of people, places, and things. Play, as in manipulating your physical realities with vast curiosity. Play, as in reimagining what is and what can be - even in our most challenging moments. Perhaps, especially in our most challenging moments. Where do we learn to play the best? From our youth!
Here at Lion’s Story, we give adults permission to play. We task them to reimagine what they needed from the adults that were responsible for them, particularly in the moments they felt most harmed as a child. The youth are our most radical storytellers. Radical by its true definition - the root, the fundamental source. They are closest to the cause and effect of the decisions of their caretakers, rather than a parent, a teacher, a coach or the academic institution committed to nurturing them.
At Lion’s Story, we prepare cohorts of professional healers to become storytellers of justice, but we also prepare the listeners of their story. In this crucial moment of social justice, I ask you to reflect and respond to the following:
What experiences of mistreatment familiar to you based on your racial, gender, economic or physical ability are being mirrored in conversations between the young and the old?
What emotions are you feeling as you reflect on that? How strongly are you feeling those emotions on a scale of 1 to 10?
From international aid to leading the designing of learning & training pathways at Lion’s Story, one directive has fueled me this whole journey. I want to create a world that little me didn't have to escape from.
