Gathering
in the station’s outdoor recording studio, in the hospital’s gardens.
|
History
depends solely
on the will of man.
Jorge
Guillén, Spanish poet (1893-1984)
|
“We’re
hoping this will be an example of how to work with people rejected because of psychological
problems.” |
How
the dogged efforts of a young psychologist are keeping patients in a Buenos Aires
mental hospital in touch with the outside world
"I miss you, Dad, I miss
you, I know. Will you be all right in Rosario?”
“He’s called Rosario,” explains Perrota into his microphone. One of over 900 patients
in Buenos Aires’ José T. Borda Psychiatric Hospital, Perrota helps host Radio
La Colifata (Radio Crazy), a station that transmits what patients have to
say for five hours every Saturday. The recording studio is a table set up in the
hospital gardens, while a blackboard attached to a tree lists the afternoon’s programmes:
“Visits,” “Rock,” “Teenage problems,” “Sports news” and “Dead Mute.”
Around 30 people–patients who are not taking part, visitors and other station staff–are
listening intently to “A Romantic Moment.” Perrota tells his life story: how he came
to the hospital, how a girlfriend had helped him as much as she could, how hard it
can be to get a job and return to the outside world after you are discharged. “I
just want to get out,” he says. “This is just temporary for me, for everyone. We
all dream of getting out of here.”
A curly-haired young man operating the sound equipment picks up the microphone to
tell Perrota that in two months’ time, CDs of the radio broadcasts will be available,
and that with his experience as a salesman and role in helping build up the station,
he will once again be given a job.
The announcement comforts Perrota. It also shows the progress made by a project that
began 10 years ago when Alfredo Olivera, the very same curly-haired man operating
the equipment, was a psychology student who wanted to help out where he could. In
those days, the hospital had weekly art and craft workshops “attended by patients
who were wandering around,” Olivera recalls. “I spent nine months going from workshop
to workshop, but I could see that what was being done started and ended right there.”
Olivera wanted to do something different, to “work with the outside world, with the
wider community.”
It is no shock to learn that aside from getting an appalling press, neuropsychiatrists
in many institutions actually live up to their reputation. Even today, the Borda
Hospital is intimately linked in both public image and physical reality to all that
is unwanted and dreaded. Located about 30 blocks from Argentina’s political and economic
centre, it is a place where time has stopped. Some of the patients will never walk
the streets again, others will never see their families again. Some have spent more
than half their lives inside. Hundreds of people live in vast, forgotten wards. As
is customary in the Argentine public health system, doctors are few and those specialized
in treating mental patients fewer. All this went through Olivera’s mind as he thought
about how to renew the patients’ contact with the outside world.
“I knew someone who had a programme on an FM community radio station, SOS in San
Andrés, and he asked me to talk about what it was like inside Borda as part
of a programme on insanity. Instead I suggested that the patients themselves talk
about their problems.”
The next Saturday, Olivera told the patients of his idea, and took a tape-recorder
to the workshops, stressing that “what they said would go on the air and was a way
of getting back in contact with society.
“One of the patients then said ’I want to talk about why women are strange.’ Another
said ’I want to tell jokes.’ Another said he wanted to draw, and so on. They began
to speak. It was wonderful.”
Olivera was delighted with the first recording, and other meetings followed until
finally the radio station called him. He took along a small sample (roughly edited
with a twin cassette machine) of some of the conversations about madness and mental
hospitals, and “we began to encourage listeners to call the station and ask the patients
questions.”
The Borda patients’ show soon became a weekly fixture on the San Andrés community
radio. According to the dictionary of lunfardo–a Buenos Aires dialect– colifato means
someone who is “odd, half-crazy or disturbed.” It was the name taken from a list
drawn up by the patients and voted for by listeners.
Gradually, while dividing his time between the faculty and his steady job, Olivera
managed to get other stations to broadcast snippets about what was happening in Borda
until eventually the patients’ own radio station was born. Thanks to these efforts,
and without any financial or technical help from any institution, La Colifata
is now retransmitted by about 50 stations. It was invited to the World Communication
Congress that the Buenos Aires Press Workers’ Union (UTPBA) hosted last year, and
for the second year running had a stand at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair.
With the help of a short-wave radio enthusiast who regularly tuned in, the programmes
have even been relayed to Miami and the Antarctic. And, just like any other station,
its reporters have regular seats in the press box at Boca Júniors’ football
stadium.
But the station’s boss, a psychologist who was overwhelmed by requests for advice
and has already lost count of the talks he has given about the station, still lives
on what he earns as a researcher. He flatly refuses, however, to see his work as
that of a saint. He began as a volunteer and remains one. La Colifata has
kept on broadcasting because he and nine other people work for free, and because
solidarity still counts for something.
“Some listeners found out from a magazine article that we lugged all the equipment
each week by train and bus from my house to Borda and back,” he says, “so they called
us up and gave us a second-hand Citroen.” Soon afterwards, when the patients launched
a campaign to collect money for street children, the car became a sort of taxi service.
“When someone couldn’t manage to bring their donation to the hospital, I went with
two patients in the car and knocked at their door. The patients were no longer just
deprived urchins, but had their medium, the radio, and used it to help other people.”
Another listener, this time in Bariloche, 1,500 kms southwest of Buenos Aires, even
offered holidays for some patients, who were thus given the opportunity to leave
the hospital for the first time in years. “They did a broadcast from the civic centre
there before 300 people. The experience changed them, it was wonderful. And then
there was another trip to the coast. One patient from Bolivia had never seen the
sea before.” It was also thanks to listeners’ gifts that the station received new
recording equipment.
Since all the patients taking part have their own particular psychological disorders,
working with them on the radio has also taught Olivera a lot about his profession.
Each time he goes on air, he has a therapeutic objective and knows why he says what
to whom. Currently, and for a token fee, he is looking after one patient who managed
to get a discharge from the hospital.
But he scoffs at those who like to call him a hero. “People commonly put two or three
ordinary people on a pedestal and say how wonderful they are. We’re trying to get
beyond this because the project works and is flourishing. We’re hoping that in 30
years, this will be seen as an example of how people can work with those who are
rejected because of psychological problems.”
For this to come true, the next step is proper training for volunteers. In places
like Argentina, this is probably the challenge such work faces for it to survive
and not be canonized in the void.
colifata@elsitio.net |
