|
| In this photo taken Friday, Oct. 11, 2013, 14-month old Azzurra sits with a lipstick kiss on her cheek from her mother Cynthia Carpino, both of whom were caught up in the Westgate Mall attack, at their apartment in Nairobi, Kenya. Parents whose children were caught up in the Westgate Mall attack on Sept. 21 are struggling with symptoms of distress themselves while at the same time grappling with how to help their traumatized kids - some of whom are drawing grenades or impersonating the terrorists by "playing Westgate" games. |
NAIROBI, Kenya
(AP) -- When the shooting began at the Nairobi mall, Cynthia Carpino
and her husband hid in the parking lot. But their 1-year-old daughter
wouldn't stop crying. To muffle her cries, her father placed his hand
over her mouth so hard she almost suffocated. Little Azzurra fainted in
his arms, and three weeks later she's still not right.
"Now
when I try to put a sweater on her, and it goes over her mouth, she
starts screaming and screaming," says Carpino. "I know this is because
of what happened at the mall. But I don't know what to do about it."
Nor
do other parents whose children were caught in the Westgate Mall horror
on Sept. 21 and who are now grappling with how to help their
traumatized children at the same time that they themselves are
struggling with signs of distress.
The
attackers struck on a Saturday afternoon, a time when families flock to
the mall. Couples pushed strollers through marbled floors that would
soon turn red with blood. Mothers with toddlers in tow loaded groceries
into shopping carts at the supermarket, the same carts which would be
used hours later as gurneys to evacuate the more than 60 dead.
When
the assault started, parents threw themselves over their children to
shield them, but they couldn't block out the sights and sounds. Now the
psychological toll is becoming apparent. Girls draw pictures of grenades
and machine guns. Kids who once played hide-and-seek are "playing
Westgate," impersonating the terrorists. Yet some children who were
directly in the line of fire are showing few, if any, symptoms, creating
a confusing array of responses, sometimes within the same household.
Cynthia
Carpino, a Kenyan, and her Italian husband, Livio, had just parked
their car and were pushing their two-seater pram up the ramp leading to
the mall's rooftop terrace. When the shooting erupted, Cynthia grabbed
her 12-day-old baby while her husband held Azzurra. They ran in separate
directions. Cynthia slipped under a parked car, the baby cradled in her
arm.
Frightened shoppers tried to squeeze in
after her. The terrorists spotted them and sprayed the car, until the
young mother was surrounded by a buffer of corpses. The car began
leaking water, drenching her. Her baby began to wail.
"Whenever
they heard a baby cry, they would throw a grenade. Then you didn't hear
the cries anymore," said Carpino. "I saw the feet of one go by. He
said, `We are al-Shabab. Your president has invaded our country. Our
women are being raped. Our kids are being killed. So why should we spare
your kids?' And then he opened fire."
Later
al-Shabab, al-Qaida's affiliate in Somalia, would claim responsibility,
saying the attack was in retaliation for Kenya's deployment of troops
into Somalia, its neighbor.
Terrified that she
might be spotted, Carpino opened her shirt and tried to get her baby to
nurse under the chassis of the car. Each time the infant whimpered, she
shoved its face into her chest, smothering the sound.
Meanwhile,
her husband had ducked behind an enclosure and was struggling to calm
their older daughter.
When he put his hand across her mouth, she
struggled. Then then went limp.
The family
survived, though they now find themselves in different worlds. Livio
Carpino has gone back to his job as pilot for Kenya Airways, while his
wife is afraid to leave the house. Even though both her children were
smothered, her baby appears unaffected, while Azzurra struggles with
tasks as simple as getting dressed.
Clinical
psychologist Katie McLaughlin, whose research at the University of
Washington in Seattle focuses on post-traumatic stress disorder, or
PTSD, says trauma alters the chemistry of the brain. So Azzurra would
associate something touching her face with her panic during the attack.
"It's typical conditioning," McLaughlin says, and for most people it
fades over time.
It's when this process fails
to happen that PTSD can set in, she said in a telephone interview. PTSD
is more than ordinary stress. It's associated with severe or unusual
trauma. Those experiencing it may suffer from violent, intrusive
thoughts. They have trouble sleeping. Once innocuous things, like a
particular smell or sensation, can bring back terrible memories. In the
community of Newtown, Conn., for instance, signs ask people to close
doors softly because loud bangs still bring on flashbacks, nearly a year
after a gunman opened fire inside the Sandy Hook Elementary School.
A number of factors determine why even siblings can have diametrically opposed reactions to the same experience.
Keya
and Kashvi Sarkar, 9-year-old twin sisters, came away with very
different reactions to the attack, and what they saw may explain why.
The sisters, amateur cooks, couldn't wait to get to the mall and compete
in the second round of the SunGold SunRice Super Chef Junior
Competition.
They had put on their white chef
hats and blue aprons, and had taken their seats, waiting for their turn
at the cutting board. When their mother tried to linger, she was told
parents had to stay outside. So she left, and when the first explosion
went off, the girls found themselves alone.
In
desperation they ran to the far end of the parking lot, huddling
against the wall. Keya got there first and managed to squeeze between
two large women, her body shielded by theirs. Kashvi got there too late,
and was left on the edge of the cowering crowd, directly exposed to the
gunmen. She lay on the pavement and closed her eyes.
By
contrast, Keya kept looking: "I saw three men. Three terrorists. They
were wearing black turbans ... They were just shooting at anyone that
moved," she said. "There was a lady with a baby next to me. When the
baby started crying, they threw a grenade at us. It bounced over a car
and landed next to my sister. The only grenade I'd seen before was on
Tom & Jerry."
The grenade rolled to a
stop. It began giving off a black, acrid smoke. Just feet away, Kashvi
stayed face down, never looking up. Keya covered her head with her arms
and waited for the blast, which never came.
When
it didn't go off she stole a peek. The peek turned into a stare. By the
time they were evacuated she'd been looking at the grenade for so long
that when the therapist asked her to draw it, she could replicate its
exact shape, down to its ovoid shell and L-shaped lever, her parents
said.
By contrast her sister, who was far more
exposed, showed no desire to draw pictures of what she'd seen. At
school, when their teacher gave them the choice of writing about
Westgate or about a trip to space, Keya chose Westgate, carefully
detailing what had happened. Her sister wrote about a voyage around the
cosmos.
It's indicative of how powerful images
are in the trauma registered by children, says psychologist Dr.
Jonathan Comer, who is leading a study surveying the responses of
hundreds of youth to the Boston Marathon bombing.
"One
kept her eyes open. One kept her eyes closed. It may seem that these
two girls had a very similar experience, but experience is multisensory.
The fact that one girl did not witness some of the horror visually
means she had a smaller dose of traumatic exposure," said Comer, who
heads the Mental Health Interventions and Technology Lab at Florida
International University.
Many U.S. school
districts now instruct children to walk out with their eyes closed from
situations like the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut
last year, he said. This is specifically because there is mounting
evidence of the potential harm of seeing terrible things.
Similarly,
after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, researchers found that children were
being traumatized simply by watching TV coverage of the event, says Dr.
Lawrence Amsel, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at
Columbia University. According to one 2005 study, 8 percent of children
in Seattle showed signs of possible PTSD even though their only
connection to the attacks was the nightly news.
After
Westgate, schools throughout Nairobi as well as private professionals
offered free counseling. Therapists are encouraging kids to draw what
they saw, or play out what happened, while coaxing them to imagine a
different outcome and absorb a new narrative.
Clinical psychologist Dr. Stephen Wahome has seen many of the victims, including Keya and Kashvi.
"I
say to them, `Let's play Westgate.' And they grab a stick and say it's a
gun, or they hide behind something and say they are the terrorist. It
can bring on discussion. It's a way to get it out of them. It becomes
less painful. I talk to them, and say, `OK so the terrorist went there?
Where could you have gone to get away?'"
Wahome
concluded: "Trauma is a scar. It doesn't go away. What you do is you
can make it become smaller and smaller. When you work on it, it becomes
less painful, and eventually you learn to live with it."
