Tag Archives: National Public Health Week
Gullah/Geechee Safe and Healthy
Part of my blessing has been sitting on community committees with partners at MUSC-the Medical University of South Carolina. My first steps into that institution happened over two decades ago when I was asked to come and do a keynote address for mental health professionals. I was to assist them with cultural competency since they had to work in the Gullah/Geechee community. The Q & A that day was as life changing as my presentation for the APHA. The dialogue gave me insight into the vast differences that people of various cultures have regarding stability and how that balance is to be maintained. Some continually seek outside measures through pleasure, drugs-legal and illegal, thrill seeking or risk taking and others go seeking inside spiritually, but sometimes miss the mark and think that is also an external action. Thus, they walk into and out of churches, synagogues, mosques, and locations of spiritual rituals unchanged and off balanced. I was there to help the doctors to be more receptive to overstanding spirituality and the Gullah/Geechee community and how this helps with mental stability. It was about trust. Trust in GOD. Trust in spirit. Trust in who is delivering the message. Trust in their cultural legacy as it relates to who is bringing the message.
Public Hearings and Public Health in the Gullah/Geechee Nation
The Gullah/Geechee Nation is participating in National Public Health Week along with others throughout the United States April 2-8, 2018. “Changing Our Future Together” requires an understanding of the various ways that we can support improving public health. Each day of #NPHW has a different focus ranging from behavioral health and communicable diseases to injury and violence prevention and access to ensuring the right to health care and environmental health. The Gullah/Geechee Nation has placed emphasis on the latter of the categories for the week given that improving and maintaining environmental health especially of the waterways. Water quality, seafood safety and human health are the central focus of the work of the Gullah/Geechee Sustainability Think Tank. This is a priority because without a healthy Gullah/Geechee Nation environment, the citizens will not be healthy.
De Gullah/Geechee and National Public Health Week
The Gullah/Geechee Sustainability Think Tank has been blessed to be able to convene a cadre of doctors that have been working within the Sea Islands of the Gullah/Geechee Nation on numerous environmental and human health studies. The outcomes of these studies and how the Gullah/Geechee population can be an active part of healing processes has become central to our interactions and our discussions. So, I felt blessed and impressed to emerge from another enlightening engagement with several of our MUSC community outreach partners to see a banner that indicated that it was “National Public Health Week.”