The play's the thing—refugee resilience in Indonesia

Psychological distress and improv theatre aren’t obvious bedfellows, but they are central to a strategy to improve wellbeing at the Cisarua Refugee Learning Centre in Indonesia.

Coordinated by Dr Lucy Fiske with funding from UTS’s Social Impact Grant program, the idea was to bring play and humour into the Cisarua Refugee Learning Centre through series of improv workshops culminating in a public performance.

“The project aimed to contribute to the public good and support a profoundly disadvantaged community to care for its members,” explains Lucy. “The money from the grant enabled us to not only run the workshops but to present to Indonesian social workers and psychologists to raise awareness around refugee mental health issues,” she adds.

Improv  workshops were initially held at the centre in January 2019, with an additional program run by volunteer teachers at the centre with the help of UTS casual academics, Cale Bain, Dr Mehal Krayem and Dr Chrisanthi Giotis, in April.

As Cale, who facilitated the workshops with participants puts it “Lucy gave us a clear mandate for our involvement the program: alleviate mental distress, make people smile.”

The improv workshops helped volunteer teachers at the centre enhance and sustain emotional well-being, promote creativity and grow a sense of community and trust in difficult circumstances.

“Improv skills make you a more resilient person, you learn to celebrate failure and to engage in productive conflict. It helped people to listen and talk about the realities of their situation here,” says Chrisanthi who, with Mehal, acted as participant observers to help measure the project’s impacts.

At the same time, it also let people use fantasy to escape the every day, with workshop participants imagining what life would be like in the perfect hypothetical world.

According to the UNHCR, only 3 per cent of refugees that arrive in Indonesia are resettled to a third country each year. The rest continue to live in Indonesia in a state of limbo—with no right to work or undertake formal study, and no financial assistance or access to healthcare. Not all refugees can survive under these conditions, and many have returned to their countries of origin. Hundreds of others are camped outside Kalideres immigration detention centre in Jakarta, hoping for entry as the only way to secure food and shelter during the years’ long wait for protection.

In Cisarua, the refugee community is determined that the long wait in limbo should not be ‘wasted time’, and have set up schools staffed entirely by volunteer teachers, refugees themselves, to give kids in their community the chance to pursue their education.

Initially there was some shyness and a degree of reluctance, “I’m asking people to be silly which is out of their comfort zone,” says Cale. But by the time the public performance rolled around that reluctance was well and truly gone. The comedy show that came out of the workshops was attended by a 300-strong audience and led to calls for Cale, Mehal and Chrisanthi to return and run more activities.

The group stress the role of the UTS Social Impact Grant in planting the seed for more work to be done in this area.

“Without the Social Impact Grant funding this would not have been possible,” says Cale. “It set the scene for all the positive work that has unfolded since.”

Outcomes include an upcoming article evaluating the impact of improv. theatre on refugee mental health, and the development of long-term relationships between those at the centre and UTS that continue bear fruit.

A program targeting relationship issues was run at Cisarua in April after a successful crowd funding campaign and Cale, Mehal and Chrisanthi have received Faculty of Arts and Social Science R+AMP funding to continue their work and return again in September.