court, but in this court, all were equal and participants utilized a “talking piece” to give each other turns to speak. Over a number of circles participants used drawings of trees to talk about different aspects of their lives. For instance, participants discussed their roots (ancestry), trunk (childhood), leaves (important features of their lives), and fruit (family and future plans) and explored their connectivity and benefits of diversity. The “trauma circle” was the most important part of this process; here participants were given an opportunity to talk about their traumatic experiences in a friendly, respectful and loving environment. Every morning participants conducted a session in body work, which consisted of breathing, balancing and stretching, and relaxation exercises. This was meant to allow participants to reconnect with their bodies, especially those who had experienced physical torture. At the end of the workshop, participants gathered around a living tree to study and discuss similarities between their lives and the tree. Facilitators chose a tree that had seen the worst but was still alive and striving. The TOL approach is very flexible and can be adapted to fit any context. It is also relatively inexpensive and does not require highly trained professionals. It is focused to provide healing through group therapy, using nature as a means for healing. This method has also been used in Australia with a young refugee from Liberia (Schweitzer, et al., 2013). In Zimbabwe, prior to this research, most of the work done by TOL was in Mashonaland and involved cases of organized violence and torture dating back to the year 2000. Reeler, et al., (2009) carried out a quantitative assessment of TOL’s work in Mashonaland. According to the research, a sample of 73 persons who had attended the TOL workshops were surveyed, but detailed data was available for only 33, and these revealed that 36 percent of the participants had shown significant clinical improvement, while the sample as a whole showed significant changes in their psychological state. A smaller sample of 19 had more complete data, and from these it was deduced that 39 percent showed significant improvement. During the follow-up done a few months after the workshops, the researchers found that 56 percent reported coping better, while 44 percent were still experiencing difficulties, with most (72 percent) experiencing economic difficulties. Only 9 percent reported health problems, while most of the respondents still had connections to the groups with which they had participated in the process. The researchers reported that all the participants felt the process had helped them find new things about themselves and had changed the way they felt about their traumatic experiences. They concluded by saying, “The Tree of Life appears to be a useful, cost effective, non-professional method of assisting torture survivors” (Reeler, et al., 2009, p. 180). I was therefore curious to find out if this

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