THE WAYS OF REMEMBRANCE AND SPIRITUAL CONNECTION
This annual week of unification and reconciliation in Benin, West Africa, integrates the healing themes of PROMETRA’s mission. Participants come from Africa, Europe and North and South America to learn from traditional healers, from vodoun priests and from Benin’s history as the center of Africa’s old slave coast and the location of one of the world’s most notorious slave-trading outposts, Ouidah Beach. The event began with a workshop PROMETRA conducted in Cotonou, Benin, in January 2001 with a US diversity training program called Healing The Heart Of Diversity, during which African cultural practices were explained to the participants. The Way of Remembrance project was officially inaugurated that week, although PROMETRA had hosted international guests to similar, less formal activities in previous years. The January 2002 Way of Remembrance included a delegation of Candomblé priests and priestesses from Bahia, Brazil. Candomblé is a direct outgrowth of vodoun, carried in the hearts and souls of the millions of African slaves transported to northern Brazil. It is PROMETRA’s intention to involve all people of color throughout the diaspora in this project. 
Vodoun participants, 2002 | 
Benin vodoun healers, 2002
| This was truly a profound encounter with my ancestral energies. All that I felt there and all that reached me in that community was very profound -- in every space that I entered, in every vibration of the Vodun energies that I received. Really, it was a blessing!… Read Report Valdina Oliveira Pinto, Candomblé healer, Bahia, Brazil | 
Candomblé healer, center, 2002 | 
Dr. Gbodossou and Native American elder at Door of No Return,1999 | Visitors included African-Americans – the children of the African diaspora -- Native American healers, Candomblé priests and priestesses from Brazil and people of European ancestry seeking reconciliation. | The week’s activities include ceremonies at the Gate of No Return erected on Ouidah Beach where boats waited to take captured slaves to ships anchored offshore, retracing the route of the slaves through the town of Ouidah down to the beach, and visits to healers and vodoun ceremonies. | 
Togo vodoun healer, 2001 | I discovered, on our tourist excursions, a different Africa from that which I thought I had known. The hospitality, the smiles of the people and their manner of living contributed to my new perspectives of local behavior and lifeways. Read Report
Everaldo Conceição Duarte Candomblé healer Salvador, Bahia, Brazil | Fundamentally, Candomblé is a religion of balance and reciprocity which places great emphasis, in its rituals and in its cosmology, on the interconnectedness of all forms of life. Human beings are not seen as somehow separate from other elements of the natural universe. All life is related. And all life is necessary. Read Report
Rachel Harding, PhD Associate Director Veterans of Hope Project | | | |
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