The women lie sprawled on a spectrum of pastel mats. Wood-smoke and birdsong drift in through the church windows as Seraphine explains that mainstream treatment didn’t work for her.
“I took medicine, but it did not work out for me. It didn’t stop the flashbacks and I could not sleep. But since I started practicing yoga, I sleep effortlessly,” Seraphine said.
Like so many across Rwanda, Seraphine had to cope with a catalog of catastrophes during 1994. Hate radio stations made her boyfriend turn against her because she was a Tutsi. Her brothers were beheaded in prison and several close family members were buried alive in a drop-toilet, she says.
Following the events of 1994, Seraphine says she found it impossible to connect with her children, experienced difficulty concentrating and finally lost her job as a secretary in the local ‘Gacaca’ genocide courts. People believed she was mad, she says.
Yvonne Kayiteshonga from the government’s psycho-social center says the scale of trauma and depression across society may even be retarding the country’s development.
“We have a dramatic problem in Rwanda,” Kayiteshonga told Reuters.
“Imagine a country where 30 percent of people suffer psycho-social trauma and that this is linked with depression. This impacts their capacity to work and our economy is affected. If the government doesn’t take care of that, there will be severe consequences.”
Project Air, which is endorsed by U.S. pop star Madonna, has helped over a thousand people in its first year, according to Summerbell. However, it has encountered hostility from local evangelical Christian groups who brand yoga as Satanism and devil worship, Summerbell said.
“We’ve encountered resistance so project Air has a policy that we are strictly a physical philosophy,” she said. “We’re not promoting any form of spirituality at all.”
Research into yoga as a trauma therapy is still in its infancy, but in the meantime Seraphine and her fellow practitioners will remain its secular disciples.