Hope Is A Verb - Ncazelo Ncube-Mlilo – The Caravan of Joy and Tears

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

Meet Ncazelo Ncube-Mlilo, a psychologist and narrative therapist who uses a travelling caravan to bring mental health services to townships on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Tackling gender-based violence and high rates of youth depression, Ncazelo’s cutting edge methods for healing trauma are now being used across the globe. We are proud to support Ncazelo’s organisation, ⁠Phola⁠, as one of our charity partners at ⁠Fix The News⁠.   Find out more about Ncazelo: ⁠https://phola.org⁠ ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6IWbbuYVgw⁠   This podcast is hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose from ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fix The News⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Audio sweeting by Anthony Badolato at Ai3 – audio and voice.

Hope is a reminder. It's the fuel of your soul. It's so much more infused with action. Ability to see a much better future. You really have to earn it to have it. Hope is happiness. Welcome to Hope is a Verb, a podcast about what it takes to change the world through conversations with the people who are making it happen.

I'm Amy. I'm Amy. I'm Gus. And in each episode, we shine a spotlight on the ordinary heroes who are stitching our social fabric together, mending our planet and creating solutions to some of today's biggest global challenges. In this episode, a solution to the mental health crisis in South Africa that is literally hope on wheels. You know, when we go through hard times, it almost feels like everything about who we are is just problems. You inhabit the problem story and you forget who you are as a person. And so it's so important to help people to reclaim their lives. I really do believe that every human being has got something to celebrate.

I can't believe that we're already at episode 10, that this is the tail end of season three. It's felt like we have unpacked the universe this season. We've been to many places, some far flung, some pretty tough. And this episode, I think for me personally, Amy, really strikes home. Yeah. Look, I feel like today's conversation is one of those that could rest on its headline alone. The caravan of joy and tears, a mental health clinic on wheels that travels around the outskirts of Johannesburg to support some of the most disadvantaged communities in South Africa. Why is this such an issue?

I was born and raised in South Africa, and it's a country where the topic of mental health is still very much in its infancy. There's only one psychologist for every 100,000 people, and there are millions around the country dealing with the trauma of apartheid and the ongoing inequalities and daily struggles that so many people face. What's so remarkable about this story and our guest psychologist and narrative therapist Mwazela Mwubemilu is not just that

she's physically meeting these communities where they are, but the approach that she and her team are pioneering is empowering them to reclaim their own agency, one story of courage at a time. Nazelo, welcome to the podcast. It's so lovely to meet you. Is there anything in the world that is giving you hope right now? Yeah, I think there's a lot of hope. I travel quite a lot and find myself connecting with people who are helping those who are disadvantaged, marginalized, and who are thoughtful about people who are in difficult circumstances and spend their time having conversations and trying to find solutions. I've just come from a conference in Liverpool in the UK and I spent some time with therapists talking about how to work in ways

that allow people to reclaim their power to ensure that mental health services do not reproduce trauma for people. Finally, having Africa have a voice and being seen as an essential contributor to the knowledge in providing therapy and working with people in ways that are culturally meaningful and culturally validating. That's something that was extremely very hopeful for me. But also having this fantastic, lovely team that I have here in my own organisation. You know, I work

with passionate young people who literally have given their lives to helping disadvantaged communities that have no access to mental health services. You know, just how committed and wonderful they are is something that really warms up my heart. Can you help us understand these communities that you serve? What is life like for a lot of these people on a daily basis? Currently in South Africa we have lots of challenges around youth unemployment, young people who are losing hope because they've gone to school hoping to find a job and it's very difficult for them. People really struggle a lot.

Communities who struggle to feed their children, working with families where children really don't have carers, people who are present supporting them to navigate life's challenges. The context is quite challenging. I think just the economic challenges that we have in the country at the moment are a big, big driver of people's distress. Also, the high incidences of violence, particularly gender-based violence. And so working with women, with children who live their lives every day marked by experiences of violence. Working in schools where there's a lot of bullying

and a reflection of what's going on in the broader society, you start to see that in schools, gangs and young people who've just lost hope. So these are the communities that we interact with on a sort of daily basis and trying through our own interventions and the work that we do to bring hope and just to help people move from a place of vulnerability to a place of strength and reclaim their power. And so that's what we are really about. Nazelo, when I think about your organisation, it's almost like hope on wheels. What made you decide to take a community health clinic and put it inside a caravan? I had a dream that I wanted to offer mental health services to

the most vulnerable and disadvantaged people. And I understood that many people don't have the means to access to go and consult a therapist. So it made sense to me to think about being with communities. And so the idea of this caravan was that it would be going from community to community. The first ever caravan, I purchased a camper caravan and I stripped it of everything that was in there, you know, the beds and converted it into a beautiful lounge and just made it pretty bright colors, lovely black and white floors, white couches, red walls. is known in our communities. It has become what people identify us with as we move it from one location, one community to another. With the experiences that people have had of being alongside our social workers

and our psychosocial practitioners, the word spreads. And we found that communities have been telling and talking to each other about, you know, if you've got a problem, go to the van. And so we have found that just by word of mouth, people now know that it is a van where you can meet and talk to somebody who's going to help you deal with whatever predicament you could be experiencing in your life. I love this idea of meeting people where they are and weaving culture into the solution for mental health. For the people who come to you, how do they describe the feeling of stepping into this caravan? Because for a lot of them, this is one of the few safe spaces that they know.

The feeling is like being in a blanket. I've drawn extensively from the practice of imbelego, which in my culture is about how we carry babies on our back as women with a blanket. And so when we do the work that we do, that practice of holding people in ways that are warm and secure, that is what my team and I try to produce within any environment that we invite people into, to feel safe, to feel that they can trust us and talk to us about things that are important to them. But also we are always aware that people are the experts of their own lives, that they've got knowledges and skills.

We are always curious about learning what they bring with them, things that might be protective from their own culture, their own ways of living life, and how we can help them to connect with that and to be holding onto that. So that is what our work is about. That blanket metaphor, the imbelego, drawing from culture, learning from communities, seeing ourselves as partners, as collaborators, and not being the experts, but just being alongside people in very humane ways. I read that you went to university in Australia and you studied here.

And then as a young psychologist, you actually were working with AIDS orphans back in Africa. So you've never been afraid of going to hard places and doing the hard things. to hard places and doing the hard things. At what point did you realise that maybe what you had learnt at university wasn't going to help you in these situations and that you needed to create something different? Very early on in my career after graduating and having this remarkable opportunity to work with children affected by AIDS in Zimbabwe at Masia Camp.

And meeting young people who had lost their parents, who had experienced significant challenges from moving into new communities, experiences of abuse and neglect, abandonment due to stigma and fear of AIDS in communities, and then listening to them tell their stories about what was going on in their lives. It's like they'll talk about perhaps they were cursed, they needed cleansing, they needed to get rid of bedluck, evil spirits follow them. And I remember a particular child who said to me, you know, I don't need counseling. I need rituals. If you can help me find people in my village, in my community who can perform these rituals,

then I will have a better life. And so it really felt like almost a shock. I wasn't expecting to hear children talk to these things. And it felt so disappointing that I'd never been prepared to think about how to implement what I'd learned within my own context and culture. Although I would not be able to perform rituals and do all these things, but it was important to understand this is how young people understood their lives and the experiences. You know, how can I be alongside them in ways that would understand and embrace some of these things?

So that is just very, very early on where I started to realize that there was a huge disconnect from what I'd spent my time learning and what I was finding on the ground. You really believe that people possess the knowledge and skills to overcome their own problems, and that's an incredibly empowering concept. What do you mean by that? That when people consult therapists, they don't come into consultations empty, without anything, and just ready to listen to an expert tell them who they are and how they

should live their lives. But when we can be curious about the knowledges of living life that people have and possess, we can help people to reclaim parts of themselves that have been diminished by trauma. Because, you know, when we go through hard times, it almost feels like everything about who we are is just problems. You inhabit the problem story and you forget who you are as a person. And so your problem story can be a story of abuse, a story of poverty. You only see yourself in the eyes of abuse and the sense of who you are is lost. A lot of people have lost out on life because they've allowed trauma to take over. And so it's so important to help people to reclaim their lives

and to be reminded that they have skills and that they are survivors so that the problem story is not the only story. I love that. The scale of this problem is just so vast. I mean, South Africa is home to something like 30 million women. And I don't know, statistics get thrown around. What is it, one third or something being subject to some form of abuse. So you're talking here about millions of women in South Africa alone

that have experienced some form of abuse. There's just this huge sea of need. And how do you reconcile that? How do you keep on going when you know that there's just so much more that you will never be able to get to or you'll never be able to do. I think we see ourselves as providing mental health services that are using ideas that have been developed in Africa. That in itself is a huge contribution.

African people shy away from therapy. It's often seen as for people who are crazy or have lost it. It's not for us. We are trying to make mental health services for marginalized people more accessible, but also to demystify what mental health service is about. And that in itself, I think, is a huge contribution to mental health, to have something that's African-born, African-generated and co-produced with people who've experienced trauma. There are challenges with getting the work to go at the pace that we'd like to and it has a lot to do with funding and just limited resources available for mental health services, particularly community mental health services. But there's been

just a whole lot of excitement around the work that we are doing and how people are using it to respond to violence. And more recently, I've developed a methodology called Outraged for working with men and boys for the prevention of violence and having conversations with men about issues of patriarchy, harmful masculinity, and believing in the capacity of men to change and to do good. The results of that work has been outstanding. And we are seeing men in communities really drive prevention of violence. So really believing that men have been recruited into these practices,

but if they're given a place and space to examine issues of power and patriarchy, they can make informed choices about who they want to be in the world and how they want to show up in the world. And we've seen this with the men who've completed our programs, and many of them have become the go-to people around issues of violence in their communities. What's really amazing to me is how much impact this one organization has been able to have. I think it's very easy to often maybe dismiss this as the work of a small organization that's been driven by the passion of one woman.

But Polar's programs so far have helped over 180,000 women and girls, 36,000 men and 108,000 children. That speaks to how much impact one good idea can really have. And more importantly, as you're about to hear, that idea and that model can be replicated to other countries and into other cultural contexts. And that's the part that excites me the most. For me, listening to how much this organisation struggles with funding, it really connects the dots to the Coalition for Mental Health Investment that was announced at the Clinton Global Initiative.

And because it's these kind of locally developed solutions to mental health, that hopefully this kind of big global fund is going to be able to help. And it makes me think about this line by Dr Shekhar Saxena that every country is a developing country when it comes to mental health. Even though this is very much a global crisis, the best solutions, the ones that are going to be most effective, are going to be homegrown. It says a lot about solving these kinds of problems from the ground level up rather than imposing top-down solutions. It's an overused phrase but culturally appropriate. In the case of mental health, that's absolutely crucial for any type of success.

Nazelo, you grew up in Zimbabwe. Can you tell us what your childhood was like and maybe if there were any seeds that were planted early on that led you to do the work that you're doing today? I grew up in Zimbabwe. I think I had a fairly good childhood and then I went to a boarding school, a missionary sort of boarding school. My memory at the age of 14, 15, driving with my dad after he picked me up from school. And we were driving through a community where there were many, many women at a market place selling vegetables.

And we got out of that van because my dad wanted to buy certain items for home. And my heart was moved beyond. And I remember shedding tears because my dad just went to buy from a particular stall. And I say to him, can you buy from all the women? Can you give me money so that I can buy from all of them? I want them to have

a bit of something from me. And when he couldn't, I wept. I wept. I think for me, that's just one experience that I remember to this very day, starting to develop hopes and ideas about helping people who are poor, women who are struggling. I think pretty much from that time, I've come to understand myself as someone who really loves people. There are many ways of helping, obviously, even from an early age. So what is it that led you to pursue psychology? Or what is it that made you want to be a psychologist in particular? I think it's about curiosity, wanting to understand why things are the way they are,

why people are the way they are, and how can I be present in ways that allow me to have valuable and beautiful relationships with people around me. I think I've always really believed that the greatest gift that all humans were given is relationships, it's community, it's being alongside people in ways that open up possibilities for life. You spent some time working at the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, which has something of a legendary

status, certainly in the charity sector in South Africa. How did that experience shape you and the work that you're doing with Polo today? It was just a privilege, for one, to be part of his work, to contribute to his vision for ensuring that children thrive, all children are protected and that they're safe. But also I think it's about the black consciousness and believing in African power

and that we can make a difference and that we've got knowledges and we've got skills that we can use to change our circumstances, to bring about the changes that we need to bring about in our communities. Mandela said it's in our hands. And so thinking about my hands and how I'm using them,

not in a literal sense, but just what role am I playing? What is it that I can do to also follow in his footsteps and be one that thinks about giving, sacrifice, serving for the greater good and taking on the challenge for our people. Yeah. Marzelo, one of the ways that you've met these challenges is to co-create a program called the Tree of Life that helps people understand the bigger story of their lives. And that's now being replicated in multiple countries around the world. Can you walk us through this?

The Tree of Life is a methodology that uses the metaphor of a tree to help people to tell the second stories of their lives. These are stories that are not problem-saturated stories. And so the roots of your tree represent where you come from, your background, your heritage, your origins, who you live with, what you like to do, your favorite places, favorite song, favorite dance. The trunk represents your skills, things you're good at, the things that people tell you you're good at. The branches of your tree represent your hopes and your dreams. The leaves, people who are important in your life, and then the fruits represent the gifts you've been given that help you to live your life.

And so these are things that people often forget. When they experience hardships and they experience trauma, you forget who you are. Your sense of myself is diminished and you start to live your life according to the problem or trauma stories. And so the Tree of Life is a methodology that helps people to tell their stories in ways that make them stronger, in ways that bring hope into people's lives. And then we've got part two, which is the forest, where people in a group put all their trees together and what it means to be in a forest and how the trees in the forest can look after each other. So thinking about what can keep this forest strong and beautiful and how we can all contribute.

And then the third part is the storms of life, where we talk about these beautiful trees, this forest can also experience storms and can experience hardships and challenges. But when we talk about the storms, we also know that people respond to storms and they're not passive recipients of the storms of their lives. And then finally, part four ends with a certificate that's awarded to participants, acknowledging the skills and the knowledges they have and the things that they've learned about who they are beyond the problems of their lives. And so that is what it's meant to do. And it was essentially developed for children affected by

AIDS as a hopeful way of working with them to move away from the problem-saturated stories. But now it's being used with adults, it's being used with families, with couples, with teams and organisations, in just many, many services across the world in mental health intervention. When you're doing this work and you're sitting with these people and you're hearing these stories, what does the word hope mean to you? What does it look like? What does it sound like on the ground? Wow, hope. When you see someone smile,

when someone reconnects with their sense of who they are outside the trauma stories, when someone starts to talk about, I didn't realize that I had so many leaves on my tree. Now I realize I have so many leaves. I didn't know I had so many gifts, that my parents gave me these gifts. I'd forgotten about this skill that I have. I've got a skill that I can use to live my life and to come out of poverty. You know,

that is what hope looks like. If you could have one billboard or one social media post or something that everybody in the world would read and hear, what do we need to know about trauma? You are bigger than your trauma. There's more to you than your trauma. And so if we can understand that trauma does not define us, I think that would be the message for me. You are not your trauma. That is one powerful message.

If people want to find out more about your work or they want to support what you guys are doing. How can people find you and what are some of your plans for 2024? You can get in touch with us, send us an email. We want to do more. We really have this vision of being in all the provinces in this country. We've started some recent work with teachers in schools, training them to do Tree of Life work. That's something that we're currently very much passionate about. That's our vision, a Tree of Life for every child in South Africa. Help us to do what we do and to plant trees in every school in South Africa

and give young people hope. One thing that I am going to carry forward from this conversation for probably a very long time is this idea of the problem story. And I feel like the world at the moment is very much focused on a problem story. And yet in a lot of your sessions, you start with celebrating the survival story. Why is this celebration so important? And if you could write some kind of prescription for the world right now,

what should our celebration story be? I think celebration is extremely important. I think we forget to celebrate the little things in life, the things we've achieved, things we've done well. To celebrate life, it's been lovely to witness, particularly women, tell stories about the things that they ought to be celebrating, that they often forget about or just not pay attention to, and just seeing yourself as a survivor. The fact that you're still present, you're still present, you're still standing, you're still here has been something to acknowledge. And so why should the world be celebrating? We've survived many tragedies. I think all communities, all countries,

we never thought we would make it through COVID. I never thought I'd make it through COVID. I never thought I'd make it through COVID. I think there's just many quick wins, things that we human being has got something to celebrate something to be thankful for something to be grateful for and creating opportunities and memories of celebrations can offer a different perspective of life and just give you that oomph to wake up and face the next day and that is for me what hope is about and when we lose hope we stop living give you that oomph to wake up and face the next day.

And that is for me what hope is about. And when we lose hope, we stop living. We hear a lot about the problem story around mental health in the news. But what this conversation with Nazello reminds us of is the power that people have within themselves to heal and how important it is to create more safe spaces like this caravan of joy and tears that meets people where they are. It really makes me wonder about what a mentally healthy world could look like and all of the possibilities that that would unlock. When I said at the beginning of this episode that this was one that was really close to our heart,

that is true for me personally, but I think it's also true for Fix the News as an organisation because Polar was one of our charity partners this year. We heard that their caravan had broken down. Thanks to the help of our paid subscribers, we were able to donate US$5,000 to them to buy a new caravan had broken down. Thanks to the help of our paid subscribers, we were able to donate US$5,000 to them to buy a new caravan and that has been purchased and is now out on the roads in South Africa, reaching people where they need it most.

We'd like to thank our paying subscribers for making projects like this podcast possible. If you're interested in finding out more about our work, check out fixthenews.com. There are a lot of podcasts out there. It means a lot to us that you chose this one. This podcast is recorded in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal and the Wurundjeri and Woiwurrung people. If you enjoyed this conversation and would like to support Hope as a Verb,

make sure you subscribe and leave a review. Thanks for listening.