Much of my work has been spent with refugees, people in exile and their children and families.Traditional stories are often a safe way of speaking the unspeakable, but the teller (the refugee) has the wonderful feeling of being heard. There is an emphasis on participants telling, retelling, remembering. voicing, singing the stories, most of which are traditional stories, most often from the refugees' own background. The telling of one's own personal story is a larger and more fraught issue: Sometimes when a refugee mother in faltering English, or in her own language and English, with help from friends, is telling a traditional story about loss, loneliness, justice etc. it comes across so powerfully, that everyone knows that it is HER story. She doesn't need to tell us that this did or did not happen to her. We know that she is feeling the story through her own experience.