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My Tetun classmate alerted me to this film on healing in Timor-Leste. It's beautiful in every way: as a respectful inquiry into other people's ways of living and dealing with injury and illness, as cinematography, and as a meditation on what healing and care is. As the introductory text on Vimeo says,
The directors interview a number of healers, including one doctor from what they call the formal sector. Everyone shares their thoughts and personal history so generously--including three smiling little girls, who talk about the little remedies their mother has taught them.
This is something we can all relate to! Put aloe on a burn, put jewelweed on poison ivy (if you live in the US), put a dock leaf on a nettle sting (if you live in the UK). And probably all of us have others--I remember being told sugar would draw out a splinter, for instance, and to gargle with hot salt water if I had a sore throat.
More broadly, though, the US medical system is alienating in every way that the healing practices described here are affirming. I'm not saying everything about traditional healing is perfect--humans are still humans, and any system is open to human failure, and Timorese people themselves (as the directors talk about in a scholarly paper on the same topic) are uneasy about the possibility for charlatans. ... But of course US medical practice has its charlatans too.
( I felt a powerful longing... )
I think the thing I felt most strongly in the film was the sense of connection between and among everything, the sense that a single act of healing reaches back into families and down into the earth.
Link to the film is here. It's 30 minutes.
The film asks viewers to consider what we understand health and wellbeing to mean, showing how healing is intimately entangled with forms of belief and care grounded in deep connections between people and their environments.
The directors interview a number of healers, including one doctor from what they call the formal sector. Everyone shares their thoughts and personal history so generously--including three smiling little girls, who talk about the little remedies their mother has taught them.
This is something we can all relate to! Put aloe on a burn, put jewelweed on poison ivy (if you live in the US), put a dock leaf on a nettle sting (if you live in the UK). And probably all of us have others--I remember being told sugar would draw out a splinter, for instance, and to gargle with hot salt water if I had a sore throat.
More broadly, though, the US medical system is alienating in every way that the healing practices described here are affirming. I'm not saying everything about traditional healing is perfect--humans are still humans, and any system is open to human failure, and Timorese people themselves (as the directors talk about in a scholarly paper on the same topic) are uneasy about the possibility for charlatans. ... But of course US medical practice has its charlatans too.
( I felt a powerful longing... )
I think the thing I felt most strongly in the film was the sense of connection between and among everything, the sense that a single act of healing reaches back into families and down into the earth.
