More than three dozen women and children sit in a circle inside the conference room of a public library in El Cajon, California, each holding a hand drum on their laps. No one is speaking.

I stand in the center and ask who in this group of Afghan, Iraqi, and Syrian women has suffered loss. Several hands go up. I then ask: “Who would like to volunteer to express their feeling of loss, using the drum as their voice?”

Sahad Alboshokaf, a 44-year-old Iraqi woman, wearing a grey tunic and a hijab, raises her hand. She closes her eyes and begins tapping her drum, tentatively at first and then with deliberate purpose. The rest of us listen and then join in, blending our beats to match the rhythm of her lead. Soon the room is filled with the reassuring sound of our collective beat.

Alboshokaf, like the rest of us in the room, is a refugee—part of a unique refugee-led drum circle designed to help new arrivals not only cope with stress in their lives, but integrate into new homes in this country.

Woman and children participate in a drum circle in El Cajon, California. (Photo by Ari Hanarvar)

Adding to their anxiety has been the Trump administration’s attempts this year to ban travel from predominantly Muslim countries, where many of these women still have family. It has made them feel targeted. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling Monday allowing the administration to fully enforce visa restrictions for people from six countries—Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen—means the wait for some of them to reunite with loved ones may have grown even more uncertain.

The drum sessions create an atmosphere of belonging and put us in rhythm with each other. The drums become our voice. Studies have shown that recreational music-making in general and group drumming in particular can decrease stress and change the genomic stress marker. Drumming has the “therapeutic potential” to relax tension and soothe emotional wounds.

Many, if not all the refugees in our drum circle suffer some form of PTSD or depression. All together, we speak four different languages and dialects. Transcending those barriers, drumming gives us an avenue for self-expression. After each woman has “spoken” her feelings through her music—desperation, frustration, happiness, fear—the rest of the circle provides verbal feedback and insight into what we heard in her beat.

The drum circle arose organically as a way to address the psychological needs of newly arriving refugees in the San Diego area, which has the largest concentration of Syrian and Iraqi refugees in the U.S. While there has been an outpouring of local support for their material needs, “what we need is ongoing services to help the refugees find their way,” said Dalia Alzendi, founder of Bridge, a local nonprofit specializing in psychosocial integration for refugees.

The idea for the circle is the outgrowth of a unique Colorado-based nonprofit called Musical Ambassadors of Peace. MAP ambassadors study the indigenous songs and music of countries that receive unfavorable media coverage in the U.S. and Europe and then use that music to build cross-cultural bridges between the people of those countries and people in the U.S.

Its co-founders, Cameron Powers and Kristina Sophia, have been utilizing music’s transformative power for two decades and can perform songs in 13 different languages. Shortly after the American-led invasion of Iraq, the two traveled to Baghdad and, armed with only an oud and Iraqi love songs, began playing and singing in the streets. The Iraqi people, who up to that point had mostly encountered only U.S. military personnel and contractors, were seeing a different side of America.

They saw their trips to different countries as a form of musical mission work. “We call ourselves reverse missionaries because our job is to listen, not to preach,” Sophia says. Now the group has several musical ambassadors from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Their motto: Healing the world through music.

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