It would be a great honor to have the opportunity to go to Africa and study in different countries within the continent. The material that was reviewed about the country of Angola and it indigenous forms of health care has shown me that yet again in the face of great hard ship, the wellbeing of the people can to some extent be maintained through the usage of indigenous methods of health care maintenance. What is so vital about indigenous healing methods, is that provide the peoples of the existing generations with a direct link to the ways of living the existed before the advent of colonialism speaking with the country of Angola. The colonial power of Portugal did not publically “desolve” it's imperial grip on the country of Angola until 1961 although the country did not gain it's autonomy until 1975. So what are people to do when about half of the population in Angola were children around the year of 1995. The struggle towards political sovereignty for the country of Angola had to involve a great portion of the adult population to bring about social change. This social change in some ways had to affect the children of this set amount of would be parents. If the parents perished in the pursuit of freedom, the children would be cast into a world were there may not have been a great deal of instability of the public health care system for example. This is a great example of why rural medicine; if you will, will continue to flourish when the standard procedures of allopathic medicine may fall short in the attempt of to reach the portion of it's populous that lived in sparsely inhabited portions of the country. What makes the indigenous methods of health care so viable and relevant is it's appeal to the people that use it. When the people who utilize these methods believe in it's ability to bring about a cure there is little doubt as to whether or not the condition of the patient will be altered. The value of what has been cultivated over the span of time is precious, the value is seen in the trust that a person gives to the doctor and the “prescription” as it were. One aspect of the people of Angola, specifically the Bantu tribes where the biological heritage of family plays a fundamental role in the perceptions of what can cause illness and misfortune. What seems to be the root of the view of existence, is that idea that the spirits of the deceased without proper identification as being dead and recognized as a contributor to the making of what is modern day life in the Bantu tribes assert their “will” on the physical world and cause havoc. The recognition of the dead's presence in the world to me makes sense, if for no other reason than observe what has been built by the past generations that still stands in the present time. The present time is rooted in the past, where else would life have come from. It is obvious that the past is what has fostered the growth of present, but the subtlety in which the past influences the present is easily seen in the lack of questioning as to whether a medical system is capable of being applicable to the variations of how an illness is created by the will of the dead or the perceptions of the living. What this seems to bring up is the idea that the mind is something much more than just the brain or just the object that dwells within the skull. Seeing that the dead are observing the present and can choose to affect the activities of the living tells me that the “mind” is something that has been able to pass through the gate of death. Maybe the mind is the accumulation of the experiences that have occurred during life. When the body has passed away back into the earth , what is left? The perceptions of the living have had a profound affect on the future: to those who had yet to take their turn among the living on earth. Speaking in term of how the influence of the dead affect the living and how the living affect the dead make “conversations” about the relationship between the two creates a situation where the definition of “time” become much more relative. We can begin to explore the past by understanding that those who were living in the past have much to offer when we underdstand that their views of the dead were similar to those of the present: how are we affected by the ancestor and how are we affecting the future. The present, past, future are tools to be used to navigate the sea of existence where death and life produce the waves that generate the generations which all life was a part of at one time or another.
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