Bianca Dahl

During Botswana’s AIDS epidemic in the 2000s, foreign-funded humanitarian organizations multiplied, offering what then-President Festus Mogae called a “social vaccine” against the epidemic’s damage. One prominent orphan-care NGO pioneered a model of “grief therapy,” importing Euro-American psychological frameworks to supposedly help children heal from trauma. My earlier research traced its unintended effects: children were trained to perform sad emotions in ways that violated local norms. Batswana typically view negative feelings as socially potent, capable of harming others even without intent—producing an imperative to transform sorrow into joy rather than dwell in mourning, as “grief therapy” encouraged. Paradoxically, more than 15 years after the government abruptly shuttered the NGO, its psychotherapeutic models have now resurfaced in state-run services for vulnerable children. This project examines the afterlives of this humanitarian therapeutic experiment: (1) assessing its long-term impact on the original cohort of orphans (now adults); and (2) tracing its institutional echoes in contemporary child welfare programs. Drawing on affect theory, feminist theories of emotion, and the anthropology of humanitarianism, I interrogate how psychological models deeply remake both individual lives and national systems. This offers a rare longitudinal perspective on the lasting imprints interventions leave long after their moment of urgency has passed.