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This article describes the Butterfly peace garden initiative, an innovative after-school programme for 600 war-affected children in Sri Lanka. The programme offers creative play activities and ethnic reconciliation, integrated with opportunities for trauma healing through art-based processes. The article discusses the programme's similarities with and differences from community-based rehabilitation and deals with the controversial issues of the pathology of militarised violence at a societal level, mental illness paradigms such as post-traumatic stress disorder and the appropriateness of Western counselling approaches