Sir[a] Centre coordinator and community facilitator give a webinar organised by Médecins du Monde
The coordinator of the Sira Centre, Gabriela López, and the entity's community facilitator, Mahamadou Simakha, participated as lecturers in the training webinar «Psychosocial aspects in mediation and interpretation», organised by Médecins du Monde. Under the title «Mental health and psychosocial aspects linked to mediation and interpretation work», both stressed the need to offer a comprehensive model of accompaniment that adapts to and understands the worldview of people on the move, and not the other way around. In other words, the pace, the needs and the proposal for accompaniment should be determined by the person themselves, and their way of understanding the world, health and psychological well-being.
On the basis of the work carried out by the Sir[a] Centre in the field of cross-cultural accompaniment, Gabriela López proposes orienting the psychosocial work towards four main axes: 1) Increasing our own capacity to understand other backgrounds and worldviews, to listen from a place of curiosity and attention, rather than criticism; 2) Dialogue with other people in need of other models of healing and understanding of mental health; and 3) Deconstructing our models of knowledge 4) in order to integrating new cultural models.