Our work at TICAH aims to strengthen the positive links between cultural belief, practice and knowledge and the attainment of health and thereby contribute to practical policy and program changes which result in better health for women, children, and men. Our work includes community-based research in comprehensive AIDS care, training in household health and nutrition, documentation to stimulate attention to grassroots solutions, support for pleasurable sexuality and positive living, exchange programs to share our strategies, policy work to improve and assure a range of available choice in care, and activist advocacy and arts projects to raise our voices in effective ways, ways that affect policies and programs.

Our Work

Our projects to date have included work on traditional medicine and AIDS, work which links grassroots organizations in Africa and Asia, work that brings healthy recipes and home remedies into the households that most need them, work that promotes positive and pleasurable sexuality, and work that pushes policies to be more responsive to the whole-life needs of the AIDS-affected and infected, including work that aims to more effectively integrate traditional medicine and good nutrition into AIDS treatment and care, and work which places all or our prevention, mitigation, and treatment programs within the context of Positive Living.

Our first effort, at one month old, was to co-host a gathering of over one hundred predominantly Africa traditional healers near an indigenous forest just outside Nairobi during the 2003 All-Africa AIDS Conference. We produced a book from this gathering called A Journey of Connectedness. Our next effort was to gather partners in Asia and Africa to record the treatment stories of positive friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. We organized several presentations and a book, Nine Lives, around this effort. Then, we organized a meeting on AIDS treatment which we held at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Conference Center - again, publishing our findings and discussions, as Unprecedented Conversations. We match-made community AIDS service groups in the Greater Mekong Sub region and East Africa in what we call the Africa-Asia InterAction on AIDS. Again, we published our reflections and our strategies in a book called Closer To Home. Almost since the beginning, we have been hosting body-mapping workshops with positive support groups in Asia and Africa. We have performed with these maps at two international AIDS Conferences (in Kobe, Japan and Toronto, Canada). We have a new publication of these maps, Our Positive Bodies: Mapping Our Treatment, Sharing our Stories, and opened an exhibition of our maps at the Brunei Gallery in London in April 2008. After over two years of workshops and research, we learned enough to publish Using Our Traditions: A Herbal and Nutritional Guide for Kenyan Families, a 194-page easy-to-use guide for making good food, preparing herbal remedies, and learning more about common conditions that can be treated at home. Most recently, we have co-published recommendations on how to do good scientific research on herbal preparations currently in use in communities for AIDS-related illnesses. This is called New Approaches to AIDS Treatment in Sub-Saharan Africa: Proposed Clinical Trial Methodologies for Traditional Medicine. We have also documented a small grants program in Kenya, Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa which provides support to communities wishing to explore, enliven, or revise cultural practices that shape health in a book called Ears To The Ground: An Exploration of African Culture and Health.

We are currently working on a book to share our experiences, questions, and concerns regarding sexual life in Kenya which we think will also encourage positive sexuality. This is being written collectively by a diverse set of HIV support groups, lesbian and gay support groups, youth groups and sex worker collectives. We are developing training materials for home gardens and household nutrition, and Positive Living guidelines for AIDS treatment and care programs. We have designed and planted a medicinal garden at the National Museums of Kenya.

Through our work we have become matchmakers between regions, between embodied experience and global policy, between the elders and modern science, and between heart and head. We aim for all of our work to result in practical strategies for promoting the health of poor, positive people in Asia and Africa. We learn the best of what they know, test it, and share it. Our art projects are also directed at policy change and at making practical suggestions for improvements to the current approaches to care.

Currently our projects focus on eight key areas:

  • Listening to Those Who Live It
    Bringing the voices of HIV+ people into conversations about health, policy, and well-being through the sharing of our stories and experiences.
  • Our Plants, Our Health
    Gathering and sharing knowledge on the healing powers of plants through our publications, training programs and our medicinal herb garden of indigenous Kenyan plants.
  • Herbal Medicine and Healing Traditions
    Supporting traditional elders and healers to share their experience, document their wisdom and apply it to contemporary health and development issues.
  • Traditional Medicine Research and Policy
    Supporting research teams to better understand and test indigenous healing practices and widen their availability. Advocating with policymakers and donors to shape inclusive, responsive & comprehensive AIDS care.
  • Positive Sexuality
    Exploring sexuality, assuring the safe expression of our sexual rights, and encouraging the sharing of information about sexual health and experience to destigmatize sexuality and improve our attention to this aspect of life
  • Body Mapping
    Using artistic renderings of our bodies to explore our lives with HIV and our treatment experiences.
  • Africa/Asia InterAction on HIV/AIDS
    Facilitating conversations and practical support between East Africa and the Greater Mekong Region to explore efforts to deal with the challenges of the HIV epidemic in their communities.
  • HIV, Culture & Development
    Supporting university-based graduate training programs that explore traditional cultures and indigenous knowledge in their relationship to health and development.
  • Positive Living Support for policies and programs, which recognize the comprehensive set of needs, policies, and programs required to approach positive living as a lifelong process.

 

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TICAH--the Blog