DESCRIPTION:

Interview with Carlos Salinas About Traditional Healers, Healing Bridges, Colombia. 

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; as part of that work, she is interviewing those with particular insights into the religious and spiritual dimensions of the COVID-19 outbreak and our responses to it. 

The interview begins with Kofan providing a fascinating history of his work with shamans in Colombia and how this led to the founding of Healing Bridges, the non-profit organization he founded.  The organization started as a video history project to document the lives of elder shamans and their wives in the Colombian Amazon.  These elders represent cultures profoundly shaped by outside threats as the abundant resources of the Amazonian basin have been mined by outside global corporations.  In recounting that history, Carlos describes the social-political events in Colombia that led to the founding of Healing Bridges.

Carlos then examines the spiritual practices of traditional healers in Colombia and recounts the work to bring medical doctors and traditional healers together to work in collaboration to address health concerns.  The interview then moves to the ways in which these Colombian communities are relying on the wisdom of the traditional healers to respond to COVID-19.  These efforts have occurred in partnership with governmental health officials but with the local communities taking the lead.  Carlos recounts the ways in which the various ethnic groups in these communities are working together to carry out coordinated corporate spiritual practices in a way to limit spread of the virus.  These efforts reflect a united effort across local cultures, that is respectful of differences while also working together for the shared goal of protecting the communities from the virus.