Theatre for Development: Psychosocial work through theatre for children of war-affected families in Northern Sri Lankan

ABSTRACT:
             Sri Lanka’s civil war has created many forms of tragedy. The most important of which continues to this day is that of the disappearance problem, Over the past thirty years, tens of thousands of North East Tamil family members have been forcibly disappeared. They engage in continuous protests on the streets demanding answers to the disappearance of their relatives. It remains an unsolved problem to this day. The families of the missing continue to suffer. The Northern Sri Lankan Tamil community has been facing such a situation for the last thirty or forty years. In particular, there is a need to continue working on the psychological development of war-affected children. During the period 1997/1998 when people started re-settling in their own places after the Jaffna displacement, NGOs formed children’s clubs for the psycho-social development of the affected children. A Thunivu (Courage) play prepared for such an activity is researched here. The drama consoled the children by expressing the emotional distress of families who lost their fathers and lost family members. It is studied on the basis of the Applied Theatre Concept for psychosocial development.