Asakiyume mita

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 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 really powerful longing, like an actual heartache, hearing some of the things people said and how they acted. Here Jose da Costa takes time, talking with a woman about her son, who's ill. He asks questions, then listens attentively and sympathetically to her answers.



Later he says a healer must never ask for payment. The patient can offer something, but the healer should never ask, or it will shorten their life. [Pragmatically speaking, I know this doesn't mean there's no expectation of compensation, but framing matters!]



Palmira Ximenes talks about saying the name of the person you want to heal as you go to collect medicinal plants, and says you need to say a prayer of thanksgiving as you collect them, otherwise the medicine will have no power. "You can't just go grabbing stuff." Hello, international pharmaceutical industry? Ms. Ximenes has some words for you.



A man whose name I didn't catch became a bone setter in an area that has no clinics. During the time it takes their injury to heal, they stay in his house or in the homes of his neighbors: "We consider patients to be family, too," he says.



One healer--also named Jose da Costa--talks about the healing nature of water. "Everything is medicine," he says. The power of water, he says, comes from its coolness.



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.