Tree of life: This Topic is a program we use as GAOS to better understand the life stories of our children. This helps us to offer appropriate counseling to our orphans and vulnerable children when we understand their life story. In this exercise we would invite children to draw their ‘Tree of Life’ with particular attention paid to the following themes:

Roots: Children are invited to think about and write on their Tree of Life significant figures from their ancestry, origins and family history.

Trunk: The trunk of the tree is a prompt for children to draw representations of significant events that had shaped their lives: these are either positive events or events that could be regarded as difficult or that evoked a painful memory.

Leaves: The leaves of the tree represented important people or significant relationships in an individual’s life. We introduced the metaphor of fallen leaves to represent important people that had been lost to the child (e.g. parents who had died).