Nadia Lubowski, the director of the Anton Lubowski Educational Trust (ALET), faced the trauma of her father being assassinated in front of their home in Namibia when she was just nine years old. Having to deal with this trauma, she has adopted a leading art-based, trauma-informed approach to early childhood education in Philippi on the Cape Flats, where she teaches pre-school children. In an interview with Biznews, Lubowski highlighted the stark disparities in educational experiences between children in affluent suburbs and those in townships like Philippi, an area marked by violence. She recounts the harrowing story of a child in her programme who witnessed a classmate being shot. It is children like this that Lubowski wants to help, using art therapy to express their emotions and cope with trauma. Having identified a suitable piece of land, she is currently planning an art centre that would provide a safe space for parents, mothers, and young children to gather. ALET is in the process of raising R27 million for the project, and Lubowski emphasises that while forming a partnership with a corporate entity would be beneficial, it is essential that the initiative remains rooted in collaboration with the community to truly make a difference in the lives of Philippi’s children.
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Edited transcript of the interview
Linda van Tilburg (00:00:00)
Nadia Lubowski, the director of the Anton Lubowski Educational Trust (ALET), is pioneering an arts-based, trauma-informed approach to early childhood education in Cape Town. We’re thrilled to have her in the Linda van Tilburg studio today.
And we must ask about the family connection, Anton Lubowski. Was that your father?
Nadia Lubowski (00:57.757)
Yeah, that was my father assassinated in front of our house when I was nine years old in Namibia.
Linda van Tilburg (00:38.00)
Oof, okay. Can we ask you what inspired you to initiate this program and how art healing or facilitation can help heal from trauma?
Nadia Lubowski (00:51.00)
So, it doesn’t feel like a very short answer, but I studied to become a kindergarten teacher and loved it but felt that what I got taught in my studies didn’t really correlate with what I had to do in the classroom. Then I became very interested through my internships as a teacher that the school situations were so disparate. There were such huge differences between the children in the suburbs versus the children in the townships. I just became very fascinated with that. And then the things that I saw, and language was a big barrier for children. Then my very first job was in a township school in Filippi, Cape Town. It was an incredible thing to observe and to be part of, to see how children can develop and flourish in the right kinds of environments.
I then went, I carried on studying and everything. Then we as a family decided, because my father’s killing and his assassination have never been brought to justice, that one of the ways that we could really honour his life is through having an organization in his name that does amazing work. That’s how the journey started having worked with different ECD centres. In 2016, we bought a piece of land in Philippi that we want to now develop into this kindergarten that really works with the community and the parents right from the start. So, it’s about building circles of support around the young children because children in the townships really suffer and encounter a lot of traumas in their lives. So, wanting to mitigate that and just help with that.
Linda van Tilburg (00:2:47))
So, you’ve got the land, how do you want to expand that?
Nadia Lubowski (03:20.225)
Well, so we’ve got the land, and we’ve worked with the community for a long time and now we really want to start building. So, we got a really wonderful donation from the Jannie Mouton Foundation and we’re going to do the playground and the trees. But then we really want to start building classrooms and toilets and kind of build it up.
But we’re looking for funding for that. So, we’re very actively trying to find people that are interested in wanting to be part of a project like that.
Currently, art therapy comes into the whole dynamic that we have been working with the community for a very long time, and we’ve really just begun to understand the level of trauma that people are dealing with. So, we’ve partnered with a really amazing organization called Sp(I)eel Arts Therapies Collective and we started to work with them in an art therapy-based way and the things that are emerging and the ways that even as a community there’s these relationships that begin to form and just the kind of degree of pause that the people get. And the children are loving it. And it’s just the most phenomenal way to engage with wanting to develop something together. So. it’s not us wanting to come and say, OK, we’re going to do this, but we’re actually doing it together. It’s been amazing because we’re really working with the resources, they already have within them.
The creative process bypasses cognitive skills like the needing to express yourself properly and the language barriers. And it just brings the children and the parents into their bodies, which is just such a wonderful way to work.
Linda van Tilburg (00:04.40)
Where a kid, wouldn’t be able to say what kind of trauma or how he feels but might be able to draw it or paint it?
Nadia Lubowski (00:04:50)
Correct and because the art therapy and creative ways of working engage the child’s safety system. So, they feel safe at that moment when you deal with trauma, and I mean, I’m talking about this also very much from experience, not in any way the same kind of experience, but having had a traumatic experience in my life, I know how it shuts the brain down, it shuts things down and you go into a coping mechanism.
Coping can often be like a flight or fight scenario. kind of working, engaging the safety system and engaging the safety system as often as possible gives the child that pause to be able to bypass the normal, the immediate responses to something where a child will always think they’re in danger and kind of needing to rewire that just makes a really big difference for the child’s ability to function in a cognitive way or function in a slightly better way than they currently can without that kind of therapy in place.
Linda van Tilburg (00:05:03))
So, people who might not know Philippi or that era, which is the Cape Flats, what is the source of the trauma?
Nadia Lubowski (00:06.10)
So, the one girl was telling us while we are working on the story, and they had to write something. But it was we’d really worked so beautifully with safe places and unsafe places, and they were drawing, and they were then starting to write and the one little girl said that she had seen in her class had a child shot in her class and she was then starting to say how she has never known what to do. And she’s a little bit older, so she’s about nine, 10 years old. So, they see, see, they see people being drunk all the time and the violence that goes around that, the rapes that go on, the murders, the stabbings, you know, the just the immediate environment. Mean, the toilets, the running water.
I went to a classroom quite recently where the classroom was so full, that there was literally no space for a mouse and these little five-year-olds are sleeping on a concrete floor because there isn’t enough carpet space. That’s a reality that’s really happening for our children and a child’s not going to be able to say, doesn’t work for me. A five-year-old, I can’t say, but I don’t like lying on a concrete floor. They just start taking it as given.
A child can’t articulate what’s bothering them necessarily. If they’re seeing these kinds of things, they take it as normal. Seeing their fathers drunk, beating someone, something that’s very traumatic, but they don’t know how to say that that was very scary.
Linda van Tilburg (00:08.18)
Can you share any stories of the success you had, and what effect art has had on traumatised children?
Nadia Lubowski (00:08.25)
So, I’m not talking about solving the entire trauma and the child suddenly healed and better because that unfortunately doesn’t happen. For instance, there was a child, we were working with a story. I often start working with a story with the children and he was incredibly traumatized from having been bullied. He didn’t want to do the activity that we were going to do and then I gave him some play dough.
He started to make the objects that he would have wanted to write about because he at that moment didn’t want to write and he started to make these incredible little figures that he wanted to use to describe the activity. He was sobbing. He was literally sobbing because he didn’t want to write.
He didn’t know that you’re not forced to do it and then after sobbing and just being able to work with his hands, just being able to work with the play dough, started to really calm down and then became so creative in an alternative way to express himself. He now comes to our sessions regularly and absolutely loves it, like wears his little shirt and, you know, he’s just so happy to come.
Then the conversations that are starting to happen amongst the children as we’re using these different stories and these activities to work with. U’s a lot of stuff that we do, dancing, painting and drawing, but also predominantly just being in your body by working with clay, working with Play-Doh. And you can see it in the child. It immediately just calms them to be able to engage. I have so many others. Mean, a lot of the parents.
The adults that we work with are talking about kind of the relationships that they didn’t know they could have with their neighbour because it’s such a deep protection, you know, on needing to kind of protect yourself from the harms that you think are going to come at you the whole time. So, there’s just this wonderful relationship-building that’s happening amongst our participants.
Linda van Tilburg (00:10:35)
So, what are your future plans apart from what you want to try to build in Philippi? Do you want to expand because it seems like an amazing programme to deal with trauma?
Nadia Lubowski (00:.751)
It is an amazing program. Sp(I)eel Arts Therapies Collective does a lot of the work with the adults and they do amazing work all over the country. So, we definitely want to expand into other areas. Currently, our focus is on wanting to build the centre to have a safe space because the whole community doesn’t have a safe space. So, our workshops are like in these cramped little spaces, trying to do the best that we can.
People need they need a safe space to come. It’s around really building those circles of support around the young children so that the communities and the parents and the mothers can all form safe areas for themselves. So, we are really focusing on building that centre. Then we would love to be able to showcase what we’ve been doing in that centre so that people can come and kind of just show them how important this kind of work is to do with children and not have to have them recite Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday every single day when it ultimately means nothing to them. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do it, but you don’t have to do it every single day when actually the child needs such different care and attention that it needs to flourish as a human.
So, our main focus is building the building now,
Linda van Tilburg (00:12.13)
So, what do need to do that? Is there a figure in your head?
Nadia Lubowski (00:12.18)
So, we are still getting the quantity survey to draw up the amounts, but sort of when we initially drew up the plans in 2018, we were sitting at about 22. So, I’m assuming it will be about R27 million now and then to have a couple of years of operational costs covered as well. So, we’re looking for that amount, R27 million, which is doable from an international perspective, or a corporate CSI and it’ll be in stages.
Linda van Tilburg (0012:48)
So, do you think you need help from corporates?
Nadia Lubowski (00:12.57)
Yeah, absolutely. It would be really great to have a partnership with a corporate because I think corporates need to give back in the way that they need to fix a lot of the disparities that are now existing in our country. But it also needs to come from the community that they can’t just be asking to give, give, give. It must be a very equal partnership between the giving and the taking so that both ends are receiving something and both ends are giving something. So that it really becomes a collaborative partnership in making a difference in our children’s lives
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