DESCRIPTION:

The Reverend Doctor Melissa Sexton is a post-doctoral fellow in the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine and an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church.  Dr. Sexton is completing a practicum with the Interfaith Health Program as part of her fellowship; through this practicum, she is interviewing those with particular insights into the religious and spiritual dimensions of the COVID-19 outbreak and our responses to it. 

In this interview, Dr. Lartey discusses ways to draw on our spiritual, cultural, and emotional resources o promote individual and community well-being in response to COVID.  Drawing on his own cultural contexts as a Ghanaian,  Dr. Lartey highlights the wisdom and insights that various African cultural practices offer in this regard.  He urges outside “experts” such as global health researchers to employ cultural humility in recognizing that there are intrinsic resources that those impacted by COVID-19 possess.    Such an approach has many implications. 

• First it challenges the double-sided danger of a “savior complex” with technical experts (often from Western contexts such as the US or Europe) assuming the superiority of their knowledge and skills while many people in societies across the African continent perpetuate this fallacy by believing that they possess no intrinsic resources but must rely on outside saviors. 
• Second, it fosters an appreciation for a deep, holistic concept of personhood found across various African cultures.  From this concept, there is no way of understanding ourselves from a medical perspective without considering the spiritual dimensions of human existence, no way to understand cultural perspectives without considering the health aspects.  This concepts is grounded in multiplicity over singular, linear concepts that privilege only way of knowing at the expense of others
• Third, it reveals that religion and health are not antagonists but partners. Dr. Lartey reflects on Jesus’ words in the Gospel of John: “I have come that they may have life and have it more abundantly.”  He interprets public health measures such as social distancing and contact tracing as practices that value the sacredness of life; therefore, they are evidence of the Christ.  

Dr. Lartey ends the interview by offering examples of congregations stepping up to work side-by-side public health officials and clinical care providers out of a shared commitment to address our shared responsibility to care for each other.  That, he says, is the true gift of community: people who are different working together for the well-being of all.