On Wednesday, Oct. 9, Keene State College’s Cohen Center hosted an event called “Resilience and Health in Conflict” in the Alumni Center’s Norma Walker Hall.
This event covered the power of resilience and how to support survivors of genocide in the United States as well as abroad. The table was set up with four speakers featuring Executive Director of Monadnock Center For Violence Prevention Mike Hirsch, Professor of Health Sciences Dr. Margaret Henning, Professor of Health Sciences Dr. Jeanelle Boyer, Chair and Associate Professor of the Department of Holocaust and Genocide Studies Dr. Ashley Greene and Director of the Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies Dr. Kate Gibeault as a moderator.
Students from Greene’s course “Introduction to Holocaust and Genocide Studies” attended, as well as students from Boyer’s “Resilience for Well-Being” course.
Gibeault had questions set up for each speaker and gave them a couple of minutes to share their answers with the audience. The audience also had some time to think about a question they wanted more clarification on or other questions the speakers did not have time to cover.
To end the event, participants were put into groups to answer questions from a poster they were assigned to. Each member in the group was assigned a couple of minutes to write down their answer and then rotate clockwise to answer the next question.
When speaking about supporting survivors in genocide, Greene said, “It’s a process that’s so incredibly personal, I think that the answer to that looks different in every case because every survivor has gone through a different experience, has different needs and wants something different from the process.”
Describing these needs, Greene said that some survivors “want justice, in some cases attribution, they want accountability for the perpetrators who carried out these crimes, other survivors want to forget and move on with their lives and to figure out what are the next steps. How do I go to work again? How do I send my kids to school after what happened here? Every survivor had a different story and different set of hopes, the process looks different for everyone.”
Tamy Jacques can be contacted at
tjacques@kscequinox.com
