Many hands make a book: launching the Kitabna Toolkit for story-writing in Armenia this summer 2024

"I felt that it's not a method that you can create damage with. It's creating, step-by-step, and giving the time to think, to speak, to tell the stuff, so it makes me more comfortable in my feelings as well. Your mind is creating steps and growing, and the problem that you have, you are growing and solving - it's just another step, to solve the problem. And you are finding the way to solve a problem, and you are giving yourself a chance to find the resources that you have inside. In you is this resource, it's not from the outside."

Ani Yengibaryan, Psychologist and arts therapist at Children of Armenia Fund Centre, Armavir provence, on using the Kitabna story-writing toolkit with children affected by conflict

It feels like a long time since we stood beneath Ani's apricot trees, learning about her outdoor therapeutic practices with children since we met last April. Armavir province, with its gentle mountains and sleepy villages, felt far from the bustling boulevards of Yerevan. There, in the peace, we could understand Ani's trust in the power of nature, and her longing, as we traced the border with Turkey, looking into the lands where her grandparents had lived. Although part of another state now, this is a place many still call Western Armenia in their hearts.

The road that leads to "The Gate of Armenia"

Our focus on this trip was further east, to survivors of another threatened border: the border with Azerbaijan, which has been contested over several decades, most recently with the seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023. This led to the displacement of over 100,000 Armenians last year, whose families had lived there for generations. Their home, known locally as "Artsakh", was no longer somewhere they could return to.

In late 2022, a partnership was formed between two Yerevan-based NGOs, Educational and Cultural Bridges Armenia, Cultural and Social Narratives Laboratory, and two UK-based organisations, my NGO, Kitabna - Our Book CIC, and Cardiff University, to promote the benefits of story-writing as a tool which can aid the support of refugee children affected by conflict in Armenia.

The partnership between Professor David Clarke of Cardiff University, myself, as the founder and director of Kitabna – Our Book CIC, Arpine Konstanyan, director of EC Bridges Armenia, Mariam Yeghiazaryan of Cultural and Social Narratives Laboratory Armenia and Mariam Mughdusyan, founder of Masoor Art House, received two rounds of funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council between 2022 and 2024 to design and implement the following:

• A two-day workshop for Armenian psychologists and social workers who were interested in using Kitabna’s story-writing practices in their work in April 2023.

Meeting our participants for the first time in Yerevan, in April 2023

• The development of a story-writing toolkit of 10 years of Kitabna’s best practices based on the outcomes of the workshop, with specifications outlined by our Armenian participants, available here in English and Armenian: Our Toolkit.

• A three-month pilot of our toolkit with Armenian partner, Masoor Art House, in early 2024, with children living in the village of Berdavan on the border with Azerbaijan, consistently affected by ongoing tensions (supported by our team with remote meetings via Zoom).

• A feedback process with psychologists and arts practitioners implementing the toolkit’s activities in Yerevan, Armavir province and Berdavan.
  

• A feedback process with children from Berdavan, who shared the benefits they felt from creating a book of stories about their lives and their village.

• A book of children’s stories created from the implementation of the toolkit over three months of piloting in Berdavan (an English version of the children’s stories can be read here: Stories by the young children of Berdavan).
  

Many hands make a book

The children's stories can be read online here.

• A launch of the toolkit in Yerevan, with attendance from our former participants and the wider NGO community in Armenia, with keen interest for a continuation of the project.

What we learnt about the benefits of our toolkit for Armenian lives over the past two years…

A week of interviews in Armenia, ahead to the launch of the toolkit in Yerevan on the 6th July, gave us great opportunities to learn how our former participants and piloting partner had been using the toolkit in the year since we had met.

We spoke to Narine Abrahamyan-Tovmasyan (Psychologist at Armenian National Centre for Addictions Treatment / Armenia Association of Social Workers, Yerevan), Lilit Karapetyan (Psychologist at Republican Psychological Pedagogical Centre / Lecturer at Kh. Abovyan Armenian State Pedagogical University, Department of Special Pedagogy, Yerevan), Gohar Davtyan (Psychologist at Kinderland Child Care Centre, Yerevan), Ani Yengibaryan (Psychologist and arts therapist at Children of Armenia Fund Centre, Karakrt), Mariam Mughdusyan (Founder of Masoor Arts House) and, of course, the children Mariam was working with from Berdavan village.

Our key findings were:

• When gathering feedback from the process in July 2024, we discovered that participants using the toolkit in their psychological practice with children found the step-by-step process of the toolkit accessible and something unique among storytelling therapies.

• The story form allowed children to gain distance from their problems and solve them using characters in stories they created.

• Group storytelling created a sense of community whereby children could help each other by sharing their heroes with each other.
  

• The story-writing techniques in the toolkit could be combined with, and incorporated into, existing therapeutic models such as Commitment Acceptance Therapy, Theatre Therapy and Gestalt methods.

• Children from Artsakh affected by loss of reality (still hoping they would return to Artsakh) could use story-writing as a way of grounding in the present reality.

• Children told us how they found story-writing a way to speak their minds and express their individuality; to tell people about their village and celebrate their culture.

• That story-writing could be held outside and the open space of nature can be helpful for those affected by conflict-related trauma.
  

• That there’s a flexibility to the tools and process that makes it easy to adapt to every different child and situation, as it is not a prescriptive method.
  

• Our piloting partner mentioned that the timings given for activities in the book were not as important as letting every child choose their own timeframe for an activity, as each child needed a different amount of time, especially if affected by the conflict (this is interesting, because facilitators of Child-Friendly Spaces in Poland working with Ukrainian children and teenagers in carehomes found the timing of activities useful for planning their work).

Feedback from children after writing their book…

My favourite story, by Meline from Artsakh, about the houses who miss their families

When we spoke to the children from Berdavan at Masoor Art House, a cultural centre and artistic residency run by Mariam’s family, we heard about their experience of learning to write stories with our toolkit over several months, with Mariam. They travelled from Berdavan to spend the day in Masoor Art House, share a meal with us, show us some local dancing traditions, and present us with their book before a round-table discussion.

We were able to see their original hand-made book, and also share some printed versions of the digital version Mariam had made in English. The English translation of their stories can be found here: Stories by the young children of Berdavan.

When it came to our semi-structured interview, we asked the children to arrange the room in a way that felt safe for them, then asked them to form two groups and discuss amongst themselves what they would tell other children about the toolkit. They said:

“It gives us experience; individuality; we are getting to know ourselves; speaking our mind and controlling how it comes out on paper. We are trying to understand what skills we have and are working on those skills. We are learning how to work on a text, what pictures to use, what kinds of words to use, where to write them, how to finish a book. Working together on this book allowed us to enjoy the experience and make friends and we learnt a lot from each other. We could also network, gain popularity (!) and learn more, developing new skills just as we do every day in our life – trying to be better.”

“When asked what we would advise to little children and our peers, we would say just start writing because maybe it’s wrong, maybe it’s right, but it really helps to put your thinking on paper. It will work out in the end.”

“Writing the story and reading this book was the first time we tried to speak our mind. When we wrote the stories it was a way to find out more about our culture, because I wrote about our village and I learnt a lot about my village and told other people about our village. And a lot of people outside of our village don’t know about the stories written in our book. So writing the stories was a way to understand and look into ourselves. For kids it is a really great experience to be creative and develop their mind and way of thinking. This was a great experience where we got to put our mind on paper and then make that paper into a book, and we didn’t think that would happen – but in the end, it was pretty good. So I would recommend to my peers or younger children to start writing and trying to make a book, or write stories, as this is a skill we can develop and we get to help others and get acquainted with our village.”

Next steps...

We have so much data to work through, as we finalise the last steps of the project: the professional artistic creation of a book of the children's stories, and a piece on our discoveries, which can hopefully inform other practitioners working in various capacities with communities affected by conflict and disaster, in Armenia and beyond. This will be my pleasure to work on over the late summer months of 2024.

Then, we have to look to ways to support our teams in their dreams of sharing these tools and skills widely in Armenia. For this, we are starting to imagine new projects, and ways to seek funding.

As always, it's great to be part of this team.