Clients of the Medical Rehabilitation Centre for Torture Victims in Iasi, Romania

Improving services to survivors through technology

Since 2007, the IRCT technology grant programme has helped torture rehabilitation centres in low- and middle-income countries to increase their technological capacity and web presence, thereby boosting their ability to deliver services and conduct advocacy on behalf of patients.

Ms Anca-Simona Diaconescu, a social worker at the Medical Rehabilitation Centre for Torture Victims in Iasi, Romania, describes how the acquisition of a new digital camera under the grant programme improved the centre’s ability to document their patients’ circumstances and ensure the care they required.

My job as a social worker consists of paying home visits to our beneficiaries, writing social investigations, and finding ways to help the beneficiaries with poor social status or income. Some of our patients need help in solving problems with the mayor’s institution, with the state or other financial institutions, so I try to help them with following up on the files and trying to pursue the officials.

The Medical Rehabilitation Centre had never had a photo or video camera, which gave us hard times in convincing the authorities about the problems of our beneficiaries. Since December 2007, for all new cases and even for the old ones we consider to be having difficulty, we have been able to take photos and even to film their social status, the environment they live in, in order to convince the local authorities and the sponsors to help them. Thus, six of our beneficiaries are now offered a hot meal a day, two of them receive home care and another two were offered fiscal facilities, due to our efforts to document the current social state of our beneficiaries and bring it to the local authorities’ attention.

We managed to improve their quality of life from the financial and social point of view, but also of great help were the filmed materials we used for appealing to the emotions of the officials. As most of our beneficiaries are old, many of them without family, I think it is a good idea to realise an album with their photos, like some kind of testimony of their passing through life. The majority was quite interested in doing this and I have tried to schedule them for photo shootings, except for ones who are not able to walk anymore, whom I visit at home.

I also intend to bring into being a more ample project, consisting of pieces of testimonies of some of our beneficiaries. With the help of the video camera, I would like to catch their memories about the period they spent in prison, their suffering, their struggle to stay alive, to keep their faith, their trust in God and, above all, the huge effort, after being released, to have a normal life, a normal family… in a word, their moral victory over their perpetrators. I strongly believe it is of great importance to have their testimonies for avoiding, in the future, making the mistake our predecessors did.