In the celebrated Paul Gallico novella Love Of Seven Dolls, the tiny wood-and-felt cast of a carnival puppet show, each with its own distinct character and perceptive insights, helps to heal the wounded psyche of a traumatised French teenager.

Bypassing her worst fears and anxieties and talking directly to the vulnerable girl’s heart and mind, the shy but astute puppeteer who gives voice to the marionettes makes the gamine come to believe in the separate existence of these little people.

She sees them as “a necessity and a refuge from the storms of life with which she had been unable to cope” — and the puppets provide her with precisely the emotional and practical knowhow she requires to be able to cope going forward.

The strangely intimate bond that exists between puppets and their audiences is not just the stuff of fiction, of course. And neither is the therapeutic value of puppetry.

In recent times, puppets have been increasingly recognised by psychiatrists, educators, counsellors and others as simple but highly effective tools for communicating all manner of complex ideas and concepts to children. Of course, this is something professional puppeteers could have told the various experts at any time over the 3,000-year history of the folk art if any of them had bothered to ask.

In fact, a Bermuda couple who have spent much of the past 14 years using puppets to bring life-saving lessons to young people in some of the world’s most troubled regions are being saluted this month for their work in this field by an American university.

Husband and wife Michael Frith and Kathy Mullen, veterans of Jim Henson’s Muppets team, have taken the skills they honed on educational programmes such as Sesame Street and are now using puppets not to teach children the alphabet or how to count, but how to stay alive.

From Syria to South Sudan, from Haiti to East Timor, their charity No Strings International operates near the epicentres of all manner of humanitarian crises.

Co-founded with Irish international aid worker Johnie McGlade, No Strings uses puppetry, whimsy and compelling storytelling to help children to overcome the emotional and physical injuries they have suffered as a result of both natural and man-made catastrophes. Working with the child survivors of traumatic events ranging from wars to earthquakes to tsunamis, No Strings has produced 13 short puppet films dubbed into 24 languages on subjects as diverse as landmine, HIV/Aids awareness and natural disaster preparedness, which have been shown in 14 countries.

Collaborating with leading relief agencies, including Save the Children, Catholic Relief Services and Oxfam, No Strings volunteers host workshops that train local teachers and outreach workers to use the films and puppets they provide for use in follow-up classroom instruction to effectively communicate with affected children.

At an October 26 ceremony on its Pennsylvania campus, Villanova University’s Centre for Peace & Justice Education will be presenting its 2016 Adela Dwyer-St Thomas of Villanova Peace Award to No Strings International.

The prestigious award is given to those who have made “outstanding contributions to the understanding of the meaning and conditions of justice and peace”.

Previous recipients include American civil rights leader Congressman John Lewis, Canadian soldier and humanitarian General Roméo Dallaire, who attempted to avert the Rwandan genocide as commander of the United Nations peacekeeping force in that African country and later took the lead in efforts to end the recruitment of child soldiers in war zones, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African campaigner for racial justice and Nobel laureate.

After enjoying long and successful careers in their chosen fields, Frith and Mullen are now both of an age when most of their peers have long since retired. But the couple, who divide their time between their Paget home and a New York residence, still spend most of their days designing and building puppets for No Strings projects, working on scenarios for the charity’s films and travelling the globe to help to put its projects into action.

Frith, a Bermudian, spent 21 years as executive vice-president, art director, designer and head of creative services for Jim Henson production company, co-creating such hallmark characters of popular culture as Fozzie Bear. His American-born wife was a puppeteer and actress by training, memorably bringing to life such offbeat creations as Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back and Mokey Fraggle in Fraggle Rock, the Bermudian-flavoured Henson series that drew so much on Frith’s memories of growing up here in the 1940s and 1950s. A joint list of their professional and creative credits can read remarkably like a history of pop culture’s high points between the late 1960s and early 1990s.

But both Frith and Mullen would rate their lifesaving and life-changing work with No Strings as being among their most satisfying achievements. And the University of Villanova peace prize they will be on hand to accept this month will likely be a source of both enormous pride and considerable humility for them: pride because the award speaks to a growing awareness of the important work No Strings does with tens of thousands of traumatised children around the world, and humility because the couple have never sought recognition or reward for their charitable work.

The simple fact of the matter is when puppets speak, children listen. The magical connection between puppets and young people whom Paul Gallico identified in his story is quite real, says Mullen, and passeth all understanding. And puppeteers feel what amounts to an obligation to put this magic to good use when it comes to an undertaking like No Strings.

“It’s a miracle,” she says matter-of-factly of the power of puppetry. “When you’re trying to get something important across to a kid — we all do it every day, ‘Eat your vegetables’, ‘Don’t play in traffic’ and ‘Oh, by the way, don’t step on that landmine over there’ — the fact is when a puppet is saying it, they listen: they focus, they hear, they heed. And the fact is they also remember.

“That’s what we need them to do. We need them to remember these messages. Puppets can do that: it works.”

Just as they were for the heroine of Gallico’s story, it turns out puppets are a refuge from the storms of life with which they have been unable to cope for wounded children all over the world.

For further information on the puppet charity, please visit www.nostrings.org.uk