and he said,
"Well, that's West Africa,
and we're in East Africa,
and our rituals are
in some ways very different,
but we do have some rituals
that have something in common
with what you're describing."
And he said,
"But we've had a lot of trouble
with Western mental health workers,
especially the ones who came
right after the genocide."
I said, "What kind
of trouble did you have?"
And he said, "Well,
they would do this bizarre thing.
They didn't take people out
in the sunshine
where you begin to feel better.
They didn't include drumming
or music to get people's blood going.
They didn't involve the whole community.
They didn't externalize
the depression as an invasive spirit.
Instead what they did was they took people
one at a time into dingy little rooms
and had them talk for an hour
about bad things
that had happened to them."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
He said, "We had to ask them
to leave the country."