miércoles, 2 de abril de 2014

Garifuna, Maya Chorti, Lenca and other Honduran ethnic groups Internet websites resources


Information on Garifuna organizations in the US, Honduras and Belize and the Maya Chorti organization in Honduras and government offices that coordinate with them and Lenca organizations and websites and  other Internet resources about Honduran ethnic groups and the  Poster Session Information of Wendy Griffin on the Garifuna Midwife project at the Western Regional International Health Conference  (WRIHC) 2014

Official Blogs or Websites of the Honduran Indians and Garífunas Ethnic Federations

COPINH (Lencas)-has video of the song to Rio gualcarque which is about the struggle at Rio Blanca and at the end it names the two Lencas who have died in the struggle with the note they would have liked to have Heard this song if they were still alive. Also on Vimeo.com.
OFRANEH (Garífunas). Has both a website and a blog. Their blog at www.ofraneh.wordpress.com is probably the best source of news of what is really happening in Honduras currently.
ODECO-Garífunas.
MASTA (Miskitos)--Has a video of Miskito music
CONIMCHH (Maya Chorti)  The Maya Chorti do not know how to update their website, so there are no new press releases, etc. on their website which is in English and in Spanish, but it is a good general website about them. Developed together with Dr. Brent Metz and his students from the University of Kansas anthropology program.
The Pech Indians themselves have a blog www.culturapech.blogspot.com  but it is not the oficial blog of FETRIPH their ethnic federation.

Description of the Garifuna Midwife project Poster in the program at the Western Regional International Health Conference of the University of Washington, Seattle, WA April 2014. 

If Garifuna Traditional Care of Women and children in Honduras has Better Health Outcomes than US Hospital Care for African Americans, Why Aren’t Young Garifunas, or other Hondurans Learning from Them?

Wendy Griffin

Nilda Gotay


Miskito Indians and Garifunas are two Afro-Indigenous Groups which live on the Caribbean Coast of Honduras. Honduras in general has better maternal and new born infant outcomes than African American women and young children in the US and Garifuna midwife outcomes are significantly better than the Honduran average . While 94 year old Garifuna midwife Yaya during 70 years as a midwife reports no children dying in childbirth or during their care as young infants, and almost no mothers dying in childbirth of the women she followed through prenatal care, birth, dealing with complications of pregnancy and young child care, nearby Miskito women who almost exclusively use midwives have the highest rate of mother and infant mortality in Honduras. Afro-Honduran midwives also know how to prevent some childhood illnesses, such as asthma, a rampant problem in US inner cities, which is done at the time of birth.
Why the exchange of what Garifuna midwife Yaya knows about maternal/ infant care, her medicinal plant recipes in general, Garifuna beliefs about “folk illnesses”, is not benefiting younger Garifuna women or Miskito or US Black women is related to predjudice, no funding for this exchange and no training in how to use or access to libraries or Internet, international Intellectual Property laws, destruction of the Garifuna’s habitat and shame taught in schools.


Notes about Resources about and Organizations of the Ethnic Groups of Honduras and the relationship to Intercultural Education and Intercultural Medicine Programs and Intercultural Agricultural Programs:

 Compare these Garifuna midwife results to Katherine Hall Trujillo’s TED Talk  available as a video on Flickr about her Birthing project and the issue of poor birth results among African Americans in the US. Katherine Hall Trujillo is an Afro-Honduran who currently resides legally in California and worked for a California State’s  Medical program for the poor. There are at least 15,000 Garifunas who live in California, mostly from Belize and Honduras. The Garifuna films El Espiritu de Mi mama (The Spirit of my Mother) and Garifuna in Peril partly take place among the Garifunas of Los Angeles, although New York City has the largest concentration of Garífunas in the world.

Garifuna in New York are represented by the Garifuna Coalition and the Garifunas of Los Angeles has several organizations the most important of which is the Garifuna American Heritage Foundation United (GAHFU), both of which have websites. An important health related Garifuna organization in New York City is Hondurans Against AIDS.  An active Garifuna blog is www.BeingGarifuna.com and there is a Garifuna TV station on the Internet www.Garitv.com and also a Garifuna themed store www.garistore.com.  The owner of the last two also has a general website about Garifunas www.garinet.com.  On BeingGarifuna.com there is information about the Garifuna DJ in Seattle as part of the music study on that website and there is also a video of the Garifunas in Seattle on youtube.

Some of the important  Garifuna organizations in Honduras are OFRANEH (has blog and website), ODECO (has blog by itself and as part of the first World Summit of Afro-Descent people Cumbre Mundial de Afro-Descendientes), and the Comite de Emergencia Garifuna de Honduras (CEGAH-The Garifuna Emergency committee of Honduras) the co-authors of the book with the study of Garifuna midwife Yaya, Los Garifunas de Honduras:Cultura, Lucha y Derechos Bajo el Convenio 169 de la OIT (the Garifunas of Honduras: Culture, struggles, and Rights under ILO Convention 169 ) which they funded the publication of (They have a Facebook page which they do not answer or update. Most of the e-mail addresses and postal mail addresses of them on the Internet have not been functional in years.) The Garifuna organization in Belize, Garifuna Council, is also quite active and has a website. The movie Revolutionary Medicine: The First Garifuna Hospital has a Facebook page.

Besides Garifuna organizations there are also special government programs that work with the Honduran ethnic groups SEDINAFRO (Secretariat for the Development of Indians and Afro-Hondurans), now part of the Ministry of Social Inclusion and DGEIM (General Directorate for Intercultural Multilingual Education) a part of the Ministry of Education. Both have websites with contact information on them.  The head of DGEIM Kartlee Johann Johnson is a Black Bay Islander whose native language is English, like most Native Bay Islanders, although he is also fluent in Spanish and has a Master’s degree in Education from a Honduran university. All 9 ethnic groups currently recognized legally by the Honduran government are represented in these two government programs, which exist due to the unified struggle of Honduran Indians and Afro-Hondurans. 

The non-governmental  organization which represents all the Honduran Indians and Garifunas (but not the Bay Islanders) including FETRIPH the Pech Indian Federation, is CONPAH (National Council of Autochtonous Peoples of Honduras) which does not have a website, not even a Facebook page, although at least three people have told me they still exist and still have an office in Tegucigalpa.

The medicinal plant and Honduran massage clinic, training about medicinal plants and other traditional Western Honduran medicinal techniques, the green pharmacies (which sell medicinal plants for illnesses),  and the botanical garden of the Honduran Maya Chorti in Corralitos outside of Copan Ruinas, Honduras which Adalid Martinez will speak about at the Western Regional International Health conference in Seattle in April 2014 were partially funded and assisted by SEDINAFRO under the recently ended Administration of Honduran President Pepe Lobo (2010-2014). The Maya Chorti organization that fought for the creation of this clinic is CONIMCHH (National Council of Maya Chorti Indians of Honduras) which has a website in both English and in Spanish.  The book on the first  11 years of struggle of CONIMCHH  as an organization is available for free on the website of the development organization that works with them ocdih (Christian Organization of Development in Honduras) and which funded the publication of the book. The Intercultural Agriculture program at the National Agricultural University, Catacamas, Honduras is also sponsored by SEDINAFRO, with support from the current Minister of Education Dr. Marlon Scoto, who is on leave from his position as an UNA university professor.

There is a Honduran Ministry of Health (Secretaria de Salud Publica) study of Maya Chorti and Lenca healthcare practices in Spanish on the Internet available for free, developed by Honduran anthropologist Sylvia Gonzalez, and used to help develop the new nurse training program in the Lenca area, which will combine traditional Western Honduran practices with Western medicine.  A book by Lenca Indian Economist Dr. Julian Alfredo Lopez Lopez  (2010) who teaches at the UPN on development programs in the Lenca community of Guajiquiro, La Paz, his home town, over a 20 year period  “Desarrollo Local de Base, una experiencia compartida en Guajiquiro, La Paz, Honduras published by Editorial Iberoamericana which is available through libreros online also emphasizes Lenca traditional medicinal practices as one of the ways they are culturally different from the rest of the Honduran population and tells of the botanical gardens some Lenca healers, mostly females, maintain in their yards in the county of Guajiquiro. This book is the publication of the results of his doctoral dissertation in Economics through the Central American Institute of Economics (INCAE).  The photo of the Lenca woman grinding corn to make tortillas with a corn grinding stone  on the cover of his book is of his aunt who lived in Guajiquiro.

Yaya and her cousin were the Midwives for President Pepe Lobo when his mother was pregnant and had him in the Garifuna neighborhood of Barrio Rio Negro, Trujillo, Colon, Honduras where his father raised pigs and had a Garifuna employee who slaughtered them and the Garifunas were also his customers for the pig meat. There are Garifuna men specially trained to slaughter pigs for Garifuna rituals, just as many Jewish Rabbis used to be butchers to earn money, because they were the ones who knew how to kill animals so that it was ritually pure (kosher).

 President Pepe Lobo whenever he spoke to the Honduran ethnic groups during his administration mentions that a Black woman cut his umbilical cord and brought him safely into the world, something that has been repeated in the written and spoken press in Honduras.  Sometimes even future Presidents may need a helping hand from traditional medicine from time to time.

Like all Honduran ethnic groups the Ladinos of Honduras, Pepe Lobo’s ethnic group,  believe there is a special relationship between the midwife and the child, that the Ladino mother calls the midwife in Honduran Spanish “comadrona” (the big co-mother), the child calls her “abuela” (grandmother) and the midwife calls the child “nieto” (grandson) or “nieta” (granddaughter), something we have lost in this time of hospital births.

It is likely that the current Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez was born with a Lenca Indian midwife as there was no hospital in the department of Lempira where he was born in a Lenca community at the time of his birth. He has not been grateful in the way Pepe Lobo was, and his struggle with the Lencas of Rio Blanco, Intibuca who are protesting the construction of a dam in their area and the giving of concessions for 15 mines in the Lenca area are well documented in various videos on Vimeo.com and on the Lenca organization COPINH’s website ,including one of police arriving with hoods on their heads and saying there will a murder (matacina) of many Lencas in the Rio Blanco area, a struggle that has already claimed two lives and  one a woman who left orphaned 5 young children.

Dr. Julian Lopez, like Adalid Martinez ,  teach in the UPN’s Social Science Department, Distance Education program,  which primarily trains secondary school Social Studies teachers, a programthat includes three Anthropology courses, but the UPN  also conducts extension programs in support of education projects at other levels, such as Bilingual Intercultural Education, and the Home Economics (Educación para el Hogar) teaching program and now the Food Security and Nutrition  (SAN) majors also include Anthropology courses as part of them. The UPN is also offering the first ever  in Honduras Master’s degree program in Library Science  this year.

In Honduras there are non-governmental organizations that work in development like Padre Fausto’s organization INEHSCO, OCDIH,  and MOPAWI and there are non-governmental organizations that work in the area of the environment like FUCAGUA, PROLANSATE (which in every case are not run by the ethnic groups that live in the area) who work in conjunction with the Honduran government agency that runs protected areas, parks and forests currently called ICF and previously called COHDEFOR. There are non-governmental organizations of the ethnic groups that work in development like ODECO and Comite de Emergencia Garifuna de Honduras, and there are ethnic federations that at the national level actually represent legally the ethnic groups to the Honduran government like OFRANEH of the Garifunas, ONILH and COPINH of the Lencas, NABIPLA of the Bay Islanders,  CONIMCHH of the Maya Chortis, MASTA of the Miskitos, FITH of the Tawahkas, FETRIXY of the Tolupanes and Jicaques, and FETRIPH of the Pech. Sometimes the ethnic  federations  or organizations manage projects that the Honduran government gets funding for them, or name representatives to the national government project like DGEIM.  The ethnic group organizations can also get funding directly themselves. Some development organizations work directly either with ethnic group federation like OCDIH and INEHSCO and CONIMCHH or a development NGO of the ethnic group like my work with the Garifuna Emergency Committee/Comite de Emergencia Garifuna.  Each ethnic group also has village level leaders and sometimes we work directly with them, rather than the federation like the Tribal Council of the Pech villages of Silin and Moradel which have both a Tribal Council president and a local Chief.

Sometimes the healers themselves are the local or national representatives like a female Garifuna  buyei  (also a Honduran government health promoter) who was later  president of OFRANEH or the Pech chief of Silin Moradel who is also a midwife(partera), healer (curandera) and massage therapist (sobadora), or sometimes the leaders who are elected are the children or the nieces of local healers, like first president of CONIMCHH or the one of the members of the Garifuna Emergency Committee was the niece of Yaya the Garifuna Buyei and healer and Midwife.

The people most active in bilingual intercultural education and get training as licensed teachers are also often younger relatives of these traditional healers, as is true in the case of Garifunas, Pech, and Maya Chortis, so that political leadership, educational leadership and being a healer  and also being craft people and farmers with traditional techniques pure enough to be used as traditional medicine are often groups that intersect at various levels. The musicians (always male) and singers and dancers,  the cooks (and people who do the animal sacrifice, men in most cases) for ceremonies are also considered essential parts of the Honduran traditional ceremonies, including some healing ceremonies, something that was true in Honduras prior to the Spanish conquest, as noted in Hernan Cortes’s letters to the King of Spain after his visit around 1524 to Honduras.

 The reasons for the traditional healers being interested in protecting the environment  and thus the resource base of the tribes are multiple—need for specific plants and animals for crafts, ceremonies, foods, and healing with herbal medicines, need for them to be pure enough for medicine or for ceremonies, these resources are only available in specific eco-systems and so if they lose control of these eco-systems they lose access to the resources, and  because  both the nature spirits and the spirits of the ancestors can punish the living for not protecting, for not acting respectful, and  for not being thankful.

Also good nutrition is understood as being part of health, and so safe, nutritious food and drinks is important and many foods have deep ceremonial significance. Chilate, a drink made of the mixture of corn meal and cacao, is made of the same substanance as people when God created the Lenca people according to a Lenca creation myth collected in El Salvador. So it is not surprising that every important ceremony among the neighboring Maya Chorti should be called  a chilateo, the sharing of chilate. Among the Lencas these types of sharing of corn drinks are called guacaleos, the sharing of drinks almost always corn based drinks in the guacal gourd bowl. The use of gourds and cacao among the Pech Indians also goes back to the original story of the nine brothers whom God the Great grandfather made from whom the modern Pech are descended. Two of the 9 original Pech  brothers married  two sisters Jicaro (the fruit  the gourd bowl is made from and also cups and marracas are made from) and Cacao.  Among Northwest Indians like the Tulalip, their situation is similar with the salmon. They do not just eat salmon, they are descended from Salmon, and they promised to not forget and to honor them and show they did not forget. Somehow buying in a supermarket we forgot to think about or chose not to remember  the deep ceremonial significance of the food for the people who grew it or caught it for us and for themselves.

Part II Results of the Garifuna Midwife and Garifuna Traditional Health Practices project with Yaya


Results of the Garifuna Midwife and Garifuna Traditional Health Practices project with Yaya
By Wendy Griffin (2014)

1993--Seminar on bilingual Intercultural Education and Values Education and the Formation of the Support Committee for the Garifuna bilingual Intercultural Education project with the leadership of local Garifuna Fausto Miguel Alvarez, who was the national coordinator of bilingual intercultural education in Tegucigalpa, 1993. Seminar funded by the UNAH.  This was the first year for which bilingual education was authorized for the Garifunas.

Two female teachers of the Committee Justa Silveria Gotay and Profesora Angela Batiz introduced Wendy Griffin to Yaya as a knowledgeable person about medicinal plants. Two Biology students who were working with Dr. Sonia Waite-Lagos came to Trujillo and interviewed 50 Garifunas, including Yaya, about medicinal plant use for the TRAMIL project and Wendy Griffin accompanies them in Trujillo and Santa Fe. Sonia Waite Lagos herself comes another time with students and does a special walking tour in the mountains with Yaya to collect medicinal plants which the Garifunas often do not know the name of in any language.  The idea behind the UNAH Biology Department’s participation was because we hoped they could put the scientific and Spanish names to the plants the Garifunas either know no name for it is just “monte” or that they only know Garifuna names for. Dr. Sonia Waite Lagos eventually returns with a booklet of 15 medicinal plants of the North Coast to give the Garifunas, even though she took information on more than 300 medicinal plants, and she does not mention that the plants were used by Garifunas in the book.

The idea of TRAMIL was intriguing. They said they were studying the medicinal plants of the Caribbean so that they could say yes these medicinal plants are useful and it would be a good idea to plant them in your garden or your village, so that people around the Caribbean could maintain good health cheaper. It would also help protect the rainforest, because if people were leaving medicinal plants to grow, many of which require shade, then the rainforest would continue, and people might even reforest certain plants that were becoming scarce, something the Garifuna Emergency Committee would work on later. The difference was that TRAMIL for unknown reasons ended up being another case of biopiracy. 

 After several years and attempts, Dr. Sonia Waite Lagos refused to make available the rest of the information she collected to the Garifunas but rather sent it all to Santo Domingo to TRAMIL. It was not accessible through TRAMIL’s website. For example, if you typed in naranja agria, bitter orange, which the Garifunas use extensively called kagela in Garifuna, none of the scientific names that come up refer to the tree called naranja agria in Honduran Spanish.  For many years Wendy Griffin visits often Yaya but refuses to do medicinal plant studies due to the issue of biopiracy, about which she read a book on reflecting on the Mexican Indians’ case. Wendy Griffin and the UNAH’s Biology Dept. were no longer on speaking terms after this.

Some of the things Wendy Griffin learned during walking around for a few days with the UNAH students doing the study is that average Garifunas could name and lay their hands on within 15 minutes at least 15 medicinal plants. They grew almost no flowers in their home gardens (the national curriculum on Agriculture class of the elementary schools says teach flowers for the first three years, while 50% of Honduran students are no longer in school after 3 years), but medicinal plants, especially trees that were also fruits and medicinal teas, were very common. Sometimes things that we trampled underfoot proved to be a medicinal plant. One midwife said, “that grass (monte) that you are standing, that is what I use to speed up labor. I don’t know the name of it, but that is what I use.”  At least three different kinds of grasses are used medicinally in Honduras, and one is proven to be antibacterial and we have used it successfully to treat kidney infection, one lowers fevers and has been proven internationally and one type that is short is used to speed delivery. 

One Honduran Garifuna elementary school teacher Profesor Batiz the brother in law of profesora Batiz, told us an interesting story when we interviewed him in Santa Fe. He said he had a kidney infection.  His doctor said take bledo tea, that will clear it up. I don’t know what bledo is said prof. Batiz. The doctor said, you must know bledo, it looks like this. It grows in everyone’s yard up here.  When Prof. Batiz found out which plant bledo was, he said Oh yes, I have bledo in my yard. I have been trying to get rid of it as a weed in my yard for years, and now I take it and it has saved my life.  His daughter later died of AIDS leaving him 5 grandchildren to raise, so it was good that he was still alive and healthy in his old age. I had similar experiences with the Pech about apazote for worms.

The study of the UNAH also proved very trying as the Biology students refused to write down the recipes given for traditional illnesses, like vajo, called hijillo by Ladinos, or other folk illnesses. Apparantly this was on the orders of the ethnobotanists directing the study. One UNAH professor said, “I only want recipes for illnesses that are going to affect me. Why would I want recipes that only affect Hondurans?”  To an anthropologist these are very interesting diseases. Also an American woman who had children with a Honduran anthropologist, she had her children diagnosed with “empacho” and with “aire” and they got the traditional treatments and they got better. In Honduras not only Hondurans or not only Garifunas suffer from most of these illnesses. When I would mention one of Yaya’s treatments for empacho or haito, my ladino guards, the Ladino maid, my Pech midwife friends would say “Oh yes, this is  how I treat this or others have treated my children like this.”  Even the Ladino Biology students who collected the information, but did not write down the cures for hijillo, said they knew about hijillo and would treat themselves for it if they went to a wake. While most Americans are death on the topic of being cured of witchcraft, I have met an American woman in Honduras cured by a Maya Chorti healer of witchcraft in a dramatic and visible way on the recommendation of a Honduran friend, and she got better.

1993-1996 I visit Yaya several times a year, mostly to tell her whatever happened to the UNAH students and professors who had come to study medicinal plants and never sent back the list. I heard a lot about Paul House’s medicinal plant study with the Tawahkas, which he eventually published.

 After 1996, I moved to Trujillo and lived there at least part of the year. 1996-1997 and in 2000 I was professor of anthropology at the UPN in La Ceiba. At the end of the school year in 1996 (December) I went to Puerto Lempira and worked on giving the Miskitos the information I had on their history and culture and did some interviews regarding their current situation including with Walstead Miller of MOPAWI. That is when he got me  interested in the question of midwives and midwives exchanges, but we never found any money to do it. This is when my book Los Miskitos is written and the book on Los Isleños mostly researched in 1996. I was living in a house and taking care of a garden for the new foreign owner who had moved to Mexico. It turned out the house had belonged to a Garifuna healer and midwife, so  with Yaya and the book Las Plantas medicinales de Honduras I began studying the plants in my garden which included zabila (aloe vera), guarumo (used to treat young children), mangos which have uses for leaves, bark and tree, and chile leaves and hot chiles. I often visited older women to give them the mangos from my trees. I helped promote non-traditional tourism  through Honduras this Week articles, sometimes together with Peace Corps volunteers, and so I got the medicinal plant tour among the Pech of El Carbon,  and the Garifunas of San Juan, Tela. I was also helping David Flores study dances, and so I was in a lot of Garifuna ceremonies which included music and dances, where Yaya and I often saw each other. I had Garifuna anthropology students who helped my study of land use differences between the Ladinos and the Garifunas.

 I taught Anthropology of the Family to 50 female  Home Economics students at the UPN and one of the assignments was to collect 10 medicinal plant recipes and another 2 recipes for preserving foods—milk or meats or vegetables or fruits, etc. (50 students in a class, collecting 10 recipes each is 500 recipes of medicinal plants). They also did studies of poor people and middle class people as far as what they ate and what kind of foods they were lacking  which usually turned out to be vitamin C and vitamin A and it was a requirement of the course that they grow a sweet potatoe and plant lemon or orange or bitter orange trees and report how well they grew during the course, complete with drawings every three days (an idea from a science book for children).  Most of these students were teaching at the elementary school level so it could help them concretely something they could do now. Most of them interviewed the women who washed clothes for them, so it was eye opening to see how this class of women lived.

One of the reasons I taught about traditional foods of the ethnic groups in this class was I was worried that they were teaching Honduran ethnic groups  and even Ladinos to abandon traditional nutritious foods like tortillas, beans and rice, or fish or hunting wild game, in favor of US junk food like white bread and pancakes.  This in fact turned out to be the case. One Ladina student had the initiative to go out and interview  the Tolupan Indians. They said they ate tepescuintle, deer, guatusa, armadillo, quequeo (white collared peccary), etc. all the rainforest animals in danger of extinction in Honduras. I was amazed at how much protein they were getting, more than most Hondurans eat in a month, and that these animals were still alive where they were, because they are extinct in most of Honduras, but I was even more amazed when the university student said, “So they are malnourished.” I asked why she thought they were malnourished. She said, “They did not eat any corn flakes. It says right on the box, part of a nutritious balanced diet.” It is true it does say that. The Rum Plata signs also says, “The man who is really a man drinks Rum Plata”.   That was why I gave the assignment I did not want them teaching the Garifunas that eating all that fish and seafood (at least 6 days a week) or the rainforest Indians that what they ate was bad and they should instead adopt hamburgers and pancakes and apparrantly cornflakes, which in fact they admitted they had been doing.

These Home Economic students also did one community study about a social problem related to families. One group studied homeless children in La Ceiba and the program to feed them in La Ceiba. Where do they come from?  Why are they in la Ceiba? What was going on with their parents?   Two groups also studied the issue of maras (Honduran gangs) in la Ceiba and in San pedro sula.  I did dozens of newspaper articles about the results of their studies-different ways Honduran food plants are used and preserved (the article on encurtido is now on another site on the Internet), Honduran medicinal plants, the issue of street children in la Ceiba (still on the Internet on another site), traditional stories about men and women’s roles in Honduran society and a series on maras (gangs).  The students became afraid when they heard that the article on maras had been published as they were afraid the mara members would hurt them. I felt bad about that and no longer published student research about maras, but my articles were some of the first in English about the topic which now predominates international news about Honduras. The Wikipedia articles about Mara Salvatrucha and MS-18 in English mostly refer to the activity of these gangs in the US. The students also collected folktales and jokes about women and about men, and about workers and about lazy people to see what really were the values being taught in this kind of oral literature.

Some of the students who did this research on medicinal plant use in this class and a Anthropology class literally felt their lives had been changed by the class and that assignment.  One of the male anthropology students found out a plantain field he had bought was full of medicinal plants, planted there by a Garifuna woman who used to own the plantain field who was a midwife and healer.  

2000-After Hurricane Mitch in 1998, Seminar on Garifuna Medicinal Plants, Trujillo, Colon, maybe in 2000.  Yaya, Nao (another female buyei),  presidents of Trujillo dance clubs,  local women and members of the Garifuna Emergency Committee and Wendy Griffin.  Local Garifunas gave names of diseases they wanted to know plants about, Yaya and Nao recommended plants, and Wendy Griffin who had been an UNAH professor and that time was a UPN professor,  wrote the plant recipe on the board and using the book Plantas medicinales Comunes de Honduras  developed by ethnobotanists at the UNAH including Dr. Paul House from England and Dr. Sonia Waite Lagos of Honduras verified. that according to international or national studies that plant is indeed effective for that illness. This was mostly to try to help people to have an “expert’s” opinion that their medicinal plants had value, that they did not need to give them up.

Wendy Griffin and Yaya and other older women and even some men in Barrio Cristales worked on the draft of Los Garifunas de Honduras first in Spanish. An ODECO employee notes that it is missing the question of land problems of the Garifunas which results in a major rewrite in Spanish and  then in English.  The English version from 2000 The Garifunas: Resource Loss and ILO convention 169 is in the Burke Museum, the Smithsonian’s Vine Deloria jr. Library and some of other libraries like Tulane and University of Pittsburgh.The early version of the Spanish version Los Garifunas is in the UPN library.

2000-Wendy Griffin teaches Seminar of Anthropology at the UPN in La Ceiba and the Anthropology of the Family to Home Economic students.  Her studies of traditional food and medicine among the Garifunas, the Pech, the Black Bay Islanders, form a lot of the texts that she wrote and taught from. Copies were given to other UPN anthropologists like German Chavez and Adalid Martinez. Wendy Griffin writes articles for Honduras this Week about medicinal plants and traditional Honduran foods and the book Los Garifunas de Honduras submitted to the Comite de Emergencia Garifuna and they submit it to the Edwards Foundation for a grant to publish it. 

2001-Edwards Foundation accepted to fund the publication of the book, however it took another 4 years to finish reviewing the book, updating it, putting more photos the Garifunas wanted put in and taking more photos and having a seminar on ILO Convention 169 land rights with all the major national Garifuna leaders and local people in Trujillo, work on finding a publisher, getting it diagrammed and review the proofs and publish it. Yaya helps significantly with the parts on traditional food, agriculture, Garifuna dances and ceremonies including adding some parts only known to bueyeis, songs and stories, as well as the traditional medicinal plant and traditional medicine and care of the pregnant woman, birth, and after birth care of the mother and the child.  Meet with people of the Comunidad, all men, who control the Garifuna’s land in Trujillo and go over their legal problems in detail with them. This builds on talks with former presidents of the Comunidad and with members of the Comite de Emergencia Garifuna who analyzed altogether every chapter related to land problems of the Garifunas, eco-system by eco-system, resource by resource. (2000-2003 Wendy Griffin worked part of the year in Pittsburgh PA with EECM, including with Coordinated Care network).

2006-Finally Los Garifuna de Honduras was published in Spanish in 2006, teachers trained to use it in 2005 in three separate seminars (Trujillo, Santa Fe, and Iriona), and the book was delivered to school teachers and  to schools in 2006. It was also given to most of the leaders of the leading Garifuna organizations in Honduras. OFRANEH got so angry that they refused to accept it and did not read it, and none have used it to fight for land rights. Professor Batiz, whose wife had been one of the original women who introduced me to Yaya, did use the book to train Bilingual Intercultural Teachers in 2009. He said the book was written as if the person who wrote the curse of study for the Garifunas wanting to be bilingual intercultural education studies had read the book and followed that to write it. It is possible as I have given the book to the national coordinators of bilingual intercultural education.

This book in Spanish includes most of Yaya’s recommendations to care for pregnant women, for delivering the babies, dealing with complications, and early childhood care of children and postpartum care of the mother. There are copies in 22 US university libraries in the US according to WorldCatt, plus it is at Harvard’s Peabody Museum Tozzer library, the Burke Museum’s library and the National Museumof the American Indians’ Vine Deloria Jr. Library.

The inspiration for working specifically on midwife techniques was suggested by Miskito Indian Walstead Miller’s concern about Miskito women in Cauquira who like many Miskito women were having terrible results in maternal death and dying. His help in my study Los Miskitos (1996) is noted in that book which is in Honduran libraries and the University of Pittsburgh in the US. And so I tried to study Yaya’s techniques to see if they could help the Miskito women.  I sent the book to the head of the development agency which works with the Miskitos and Tawahkas MOPAWI in 2006, but they do not seem to have shared it. I sent copies to Miskito teachers I knew in Brus Laguna and Puerto Lempira in 2012, but they are men, and they seemed to not have shared it.  In Garifuna schools, the principal often did not share the books with the teachers (even though they got 15copies a school), nor the teachers with the students and they definitely did not share them with the Garifuna nurses in the public health clinics in their communities even though they were Garifunas. I do not know what that is about.  The new head of SEDINAFROH (Secretary for the Development of Indians and Afro-Hondurans) is the only Miskito Indian doctor and he is one of few licensed ob-gyn doctors in all of Honduras Dr. Maylo Wood Ronas, so we may see a much greater interest in this project under the current government. Dr.Wood Ronas’s family members are  also involved with bilingual intercultural education in the Mosquitia since 1992 and have written almost all the books by Miskitos abut the Miskitos including one on Miskito medicinal plants. A family member is also  the nurse who runs the government health clinic which serves the whole country of Brus Laguna in the Mosquitia. The issue of Miskito women dying in childbirth or the children dying young is something they have been observing for over 20 years.

I also worked with Coordinated Care network in Pittsburgh in 2002 and  2003, as the representative and grant writer for EECM, and so I heard about the problem of Racial Disparities in healthcare and particularly the issue of many NICU babies which is an expensive public health problem in Pittsburgh and also about the issue of childhood asthma in inner city Black children in Pittsburgh. Since I have also worked with Native Americans in Pittsburgh in 1991, through the Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center, I had also heard about special problems of Native Americans like suicide, drug and alcohol addiction, and diabetis. I also took a course on Modern History of Native Americans at the Community College of Allegheny County from a lawyer and I got to hear about some of the issues like mental health and dealing with Native America addiction and mental health issues in the prison system in the US, like being able to offer sweat lodges. Homeless people, Native American and African American, many of whom are very troubled, form part of the learning and inquiry process as to what is causing these problems that people are sick or troubled and not getting any adequate help, which often leads to homelessness and jail, and I was fighting with my own issues of being sick and not getting help and facing the possibility of homelessness. I tried to look on the bright side, oh I have an ear infection. This will give me a chance to try this plant and see if it works.  Oh Yaya said bitter orange leaf  tea is good for nervios (anxiety, often accompanied with trouble sleeping) and the book on Medicinal plants says it has a natural sedative, I will try that, that it has limoneno. We will see if it works or helps. Oh I am having an asthma attack do I go to hospital in the middle of the night or to Ted’s house and get some chile leaves. I tried the chile leaves and it worked.

I did an interview with Yaya that was published in English Honduras This Week as a two article series with her picture “Doña Clara: Conversations with a Garifuna Buyei.” I asked Yaya if she wanted the article and the photo, that if she wanted, I would write it but I did not want take advantage of her friendship.  She said I want you to do it, and so these articles were published. I translated them into Spanish and gave her the English copies and the Spanish translation.  She has children who live in New York who could read the English. Yaya never learned to read and write and has been blind for several years now. Her daughter who lives with her seems to have a learning disability and did not learn to read or write and her granddaughter who lives with is graduated from 6th grade, but they think she can not read or write either.  So I am giving her copies, even though I know she can not read them, and in most cases, the children or grandchildren take them from her without her permission.

2004- One year, the year of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, a Tulane grad student came to Trujillo to study Garifuna and wanted to do something to help the people. I had him put together a book with line drawings of the medicinal plants that Yaya knows, with the plant recipes she gave me in Los Garifunas de Honduras, and the Ladino recipes for the same plants in the book Plantas Medicinales Comunes de Honduras by Paul House, Sonia Waite lagos, etc.  This book was given to the Comite de Emergencia Garifuna and to the Garifunas of San Jose de la Punta who participated in a medicinal plant seminar that an Italian volunteer did that is in Los Garifunas de Honduras and who had a project to reforest medicinal plants through the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras.  The Garifuna nurse at Puerto Castilla has used it and the Garifuna doctor in Trujillo has used it.  In 2013 I brought a copy back to Honduras and gave another copy to Yaya as her copy was missing and gave a copy to the Socorro Sorrel school, the Garifuna elementary school in Trujillo, for their intercultural education project.  I have taken it to the national program of bilingual intercultural education and they showed not the least interest. I have offered it to the Intercultural Agriculture people, they never got back to me. I gave it to people in La Ceiba who wanted the CURLA which has a medicinal plant project with the Garifunas to buy it, to just pay for the photocopies ,and the CURLA refused, so the person took the book which he paid for back. Intercultural Education and Intercultural Agriculture are names to attract funds, but generally are not in the schools even more than 20 years after the first seminar.

When the Tulane student was down, I had the idea to try to record Garifuna songs.  Usually Garifunas will not let you record, if you record them they will not tell you what they mean.  The Tulane student in 6 weeks was not able to record one men’s song. Yaya because we have been friends for so long, she will sing me one of her songs and she also tells me why she wrote it. She tells me what it means. Sometimes she tells me about conflicts that this song has caused like writing a song on the occasion of her grandson’s birth and she wrote a song about him growing up to be a Garifuna of hacha y azadon (axe and hoe) and her son getting mad at her and saying he was going to grow up to be a Garifuna of saco and corbata (suit and tie).  She wrote a song mentioning me related to people coming from Olancho asking her for medicine, and how did people in Olancho know that she made medicine. She has also told me about songs that were revealed to her by the spirits, before a ceremony as a healing song.  She would tell me about which type of songs go with which type of women’s work and how after you write a song, how you teach it to others to sing and how it becomes a hit sometimes.

Where Garifuna songs come from turns out to be an interesting topic among Garifunas and some Garifuna men have analyzed how this belief about song ownership differs from Western Law idea of Intellectual property rights as related to songs. This is actually true of many Native American’s beliefs of songs and stories. It is not just a situation of recording the story or the song or hearing the song and people will tell you  what it means. The few stories Yaya has told me have turned out to be key to understanding some things in Garifuna history and society. One is a special Comadrona (the big midwife or co-mother) story.  There may be a genre of uraga, traditional Garifuna stories,  that are only told by women, that has not been reported on, as they  occur in some other context rather than in public, and maybe usually when men are absent. I can not see this story being told by a man at a wake. Other Garifuna women said they told their children stories when they were young, but now they do not remember them.

One of the jobs of a buyei is to remember the traditional wisdom, and so she knew stories and songs, and is another leader and traditional protector of lore besides the head of the dance club who also knows traditional wisdom as she  (or he if it is a male gay buyei who heads the dance club) knows all the songs for every occassion. Yaya has shared with me her philosophy on why Garifunas sing and dance punta and drum at a wake, which is a time Europeans Christians tend to be sad and solumn.”The person who is saddest should dance the most.” she said. It helps gets the sadness out of you and make it more bearable. The words of punta songs are often incredibly sad. “Yesterday you were fine and we were happy together, and then you caught a fever and now you are dead”, is an example of a punta lyric. There is a special Garifuna word for the sadness you feel when you have no close adult kin, and that word is very common in Garifuna punta songs noted Roy Cayetano in the book Black Carib-Garifuna. (In Jamaica the dance similar to punta is called Black and White Dance. The people from the Congo do a similar dance. The Garifuna name for Punta is Banguity which means New life and the Bantus of South Africa also dance a dance called New Life at Wakes.)

I have also introduced her to other researchers and her photo holding the medicinal plant from which Castor oil is made which was growing in her garden is in David Flores’s book La Evolucion de la Danza Folklorica de Honduras (The Historic Evolution of Honduran Folkdances), published in 2003.  (the plant castor oil is made from is of African origin and was not native to the Americas). That book includes most of what I knew about Afro-Honduran ceremonies with dances including Garifunas, Black Bay islanders, Miskitos, and Ladinos. Much of what is published in my book Los Garifunas de Honduras about Garifuna religious ceremonies which are mostly healing ceremonies of illnesses caused by unhappy ancestors is from the information I collected 1996-1998 for David Flores’s book. David Flores is passionate about folk dances and so working with him I learned a lot about folkdances and ceremonies with folkdances nationally and internationally.

Yaya was also filmed for a video for Dr. Pashington Obeng,who teaches new world African religions at Harvard and Wellesley who visited her with his cousin. She was interviewed about midwife techniques for a training program in how to do research in ethnic communities of IHAH, as were midwives in Santa Fe, but those researchers never published anything nor sent back the reports of their investigations, nor did Dr.Obeng’s cousin send back the video.

2006-2009-Wendy Griffin worked more with Pech healer and midwife Juana Carolina Hernandez Torres and her mother in law and husband with whom I wrote the book Los Pech de Honduras. Sheet of medicinal plants given separately to the Pech as I was worried about the issue of biopiracy.

2011--Writing Yaya’s  Biography as a Midwife and a Healer

When she was 91, it was obvious that bilingual intercultural education was never going to take a serious interest in the topic of traditional plants or healers.  I talked to her and offered to write her life story. There is some interest in stories of Black women’s lives.  I had thought about it before, but did not because her own personal life  is complicated and might be looked down upon by Westerners reading it.

She had lived at the time of the banana company, the Truxillo Railroad, a United Fruit subsidiary (now Chiquita) and I was interested in that. I had included some of that information in a two article series about the work of Black women during the Banana Boom era in Honduras in the newspaper Honduras this Week,which included a lot of interethnic sharing of traditional medicine use during that period.   It is also interesting how she was called to be a buyei (and having to learn to play maracas correctly for that job) and a healer and a midwife, these are all separate calls, the IHAH researchers had asked me, “Haven’t you ever written down these stories?”  There is some interest in Shaman and how they are called and how being a female shaman affects their lives.  The IHAH researchers came with Dr. Ronny Velasquez, a Honduran anthropologist who usually taught at the Central university of Venezuela. Two of the groups studied female Garifuna midwives—Yaya in Trujillo and 4 in Santa Fe, with all being over 80 years old, and their reports which I have never seen were turned into the office of culture of  IHAH. Shortly after that the 2009 coup happened in Honduras and the office of Culture of IHAH was disbanded and the head of IHAH Dr. Dario Euraque had to leave Honduras suddenly as he was sought after the coup. Adalid Martinez was part of the IHAH research group, but he studied the Pech. Dr. Dario Euraque, a historian at Trinity College,  wrote a book about his time at IHAH and the aftermath of the coup and also spoke around the US.

I again said I did not want to take advantage of her friendship but if Yaya wanted to, I could interview her about her life and I would give her copies for all of her 5 children to remember her. She said she was interested in the project, so for about a year, I would visit her and sometimes I would interview her, and sometimes I would read back what I had written, and she would make comments. I was pretty sick at the time, I could barely function, but it was nice to go and visit her. I always learned something new. One advantage of having a 91 year old blind friend, is she usually  was home, she  usually was not busy, and so she  had time to sit and chat, although she continued working as midwife until age 91 and at age 94 people still asked her for advice on what to take and her daughter made the made the medicine and sometimes she would still treat little babies. Some examples of what it is like to watch her treat babies is in this document about her life. 

I let her talk about the topics she wanted to talk about, and she did not want to talk much about being a shaman, she wanted to talk about being a midwife.  This is really when I got to understand much more in detail what it entailed to be a midwife at a time especially at a time when there was no hospital.  For me the birth that left me gape mouthed is when she said the woman said,  “I feel something down between my legs”,and she looked and it was the baby’s hand.

 Feet first, head first, butt first are all hard, but if there is only one of the baby’s hands sticking out, that baby is totally blocking any way to get out to go forward or backwards. It is stuck and if she does not do something the mother and the baby will die. Fortunately what she did worked and they both lived. 

Pablo Arzu the Garifuna university graduated doctor said to her once, “You are brave, Aunt”. She said, “I have to be brave. If I am not brave, I will fail.” She says this work is God’s work, and while the Mom is pushing she is praying, and in more than 70 years of delivering babies none of them died and none of them had asthma, because she treats them so that they won’t have asthma. Her reason of why babies have asthma and what to do to prevent it is is similar to what Black English speakers do and what Ladinos in Tegucigalpa say and do.    If you consider sometimes around 200 births a year for over 70 years, that is a pretty amazing record, but births are definitely not the only type of illness she treats.

Dr. Paul House the UNAH ethnobotanist said if I find something across several ethnic groups that is the same, then it is almost guaranteed to be true.  Epazote (worm weed), Zacate te (lemon grass) and getting rid of the amnionic fluid that that the baby drank when born (botar el agua sucia de la fuente) to prevent asthma and doing massage of “empacho” are four things that everyone in Honduras reports and agrees on, except Honduran University trained doctors and US medical brigades. It is possible that 8 million Hondurans are wrong and 1,000 medical doctors right, but the odds are not in the doctor’s favor that they really have the corner on all the medical knowledge about diagnosing and treating common illnesses that have been around for forever. In 2012  the editor of Negritud said he was interested in publishing this biography in English and in Spanish so I improved it and translated it. However, it has not been published, also though it is in the University of Pittsburgh library and the Burke Museum at the University of Washington, as well as some libraries in Honduras and at the Soccorro Sorrel School in the Garifuna neighborhood where Yaya lives in Barrio Cristales. This school has most of my research on Garifunas.

In 2012 Adalid Martinez was given a new class in a new major “Food Security and Nutrition” and the class is called “The Anthropology of Food”.  He published my studies of Miskito and Bay Islander food, the Pech foods which I had collected and he verified, the Garifuna studies of food of Garifuna writer Virgilio Lopez, and I began researching the history of Honduran food crops and the African origins of African food using primarily Wikipedia information through Wikiproject Africa. Earlier attempts to get information on African foods had not been successful although I did find people like Dr. Jeanette Allsopp at the University of the West indies, Cave Hill Barbados that knew Afro-Caribbean food in 4 languages, and also Dr. Pashington obeng and his cousin brought me a Ghanan cookbook. Both of these gave some information, but the Wikiproject Africa on African foods had like over 100 pages on foods and food plants, and is amazing.

2012 I also looked at the Wikipedia article on Shamanism and related articles. Suddenly it turned out that the witchcraft story that Yaya had told me on at least three occasions and which I had not paid attention to but had included because she wanted to include it became important, as the trope of the wounded shaman. See some other things she has said or I have seen her do also turned to be important. There is nothing that the Wikipedia article on Shamanism says about Shamans that is not true for Yaya. The south African traditional medicine, the divination, ancestor ceremony, psychopomp articles in Wikipedia all turned out to be important. The articles on Witchcraft, which include lots of information on witchraft in the past in the Europe which informed Catholic church policy and law in Honduras, but also witchcraft related issues in Africa today.

In 2012 the new movie Garifuna in peril was released and I was writing about what the Garifunas are famous for and thinking about Ashanti’s comment the Garifunas  are not famous for science. Reanalyze the issue that Garifunas know plants and while some have doctoral degrees like Dr. Tulio Mariano Gonzales (Doctorate in Tree Science from the Soviet Union, Dr. Cirilio Nelson professor at the UNAH who has written the main biology books which classify 10,000 Honduran plants with their botanical names, 34 Garifuna doctors, mostly men), or degrees in Agriculture, but many of the people who most know plants are the illiterate Garifuna women who plant, harvest, use, preserve, cook, prescribe them, and maintained them year after year in their gardens or intheir fields or in mountain or lagoon edge reserves. Compare what Yaya knows to what were the problems identified for health of African American women by the Coordianted Care network in Pittsburgh.   Research what the Garifunas have been asking for as part of their Human rights struggles for the last century including issues related to health-The Garifuna Immigrants Invisible article which is available for free on the Garifuna in Peril website as a pdf www-garifunainperil.com go to About and Garifunas.

 

2013—Working with Pech on bilingual intercultural education and giving intercultural education seminars with Doña Juana’s son. Speaking at SALALM about overlap of Indigenous and Afro-descent human right movements. Traditional Honduran goods distribution network. Work on the issue of traditional crafts as used by other ethnic groups.  Hear about Maya Chorti medicinal plant issues and issue of changing religion and wanting to promote being known for traditional medicinal treatments. My Miskito student who helped me write story books, publishes a book of Miskito medicinal plants. Speaking on Intercultural Education at the UPN in San Pedro Sula at the Pedagogical Exchange conference in July 2013 and on the political aspects of creating the Pech and Garifuna alphabets in August 2013.  Collect materials and stories about crafts for the craft exhibition and donation of the crafts to the Burke Museum. Nov. 2013 election and how it went badly for Honduran ethnic groups and their land rights. Forum on the Challenges of Bilingual Intercultural Education which is attended by the Minister of Education, Garifunas and the Pech including Doña Juana.  Asked about narratives of Indians (or Afro-Indigenous) people about traditional plant knowledge and how they used these narratives to fight for rights from the Traditional Indigenous Knowledge Network based at Penn state.. Write a series of articles about the Alternative founding of Pittsburgh narratives, the comparison of Pittsburgh Indian Narratives and Honduran Indian and Afro-Honduran narratives and Counter-narratives, a book review of Jessica Grace and take out of those  my Personal story of Homelessness and Mental Illness the story of a Female Vet, and submit to the Western Regional International Health Conference where it was not accepted.. The talk on Yaya not accepted either, but later they gave me the chance to do a poster session about my Garifuna Midwife project. I began writing for HondurasWeekly.com in February 2013. Honduras This Week no longer online after May 2013. Attend SALALM in Miami 2013 and learn what is new with libraries and e-books, videos, etc. Also identify needs of Honduran librarians and research about the Global Library project of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Reicken Foundation which has 56 libraries in Honduras and 8 in Guatemala. One of their librarians spoke at SALALM and he is also a colleague of Dr. James Loucky the Latin American anthropologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA  where I spoke  November 2013 about the Honduran craft donation to the Burke Museum and my work with the Honduran Indians and Garifunas and their current situation. I also joined the Traditional Indigenous Knowledge Network based at Penn State University after SALALM. Do research and making contacts with Honduran librarians, Honduran Indians and Garifunas and  Honduran historians about doing the Internet for Hondurans project which is part of the Honduran Intercultural Education and New Technologies project. See the website


 

 

2014 Consider combining Yaya’s story with analysis with Doña Juana’s stories as a traditional healer, and her life and my growing understanding of medicinal plants “Adventures in Traditional Honduran medicine”. I did not publish doña Juana’s medicinal plants that she knows partly due to biopiracy concerns and partly because most of what she learned was from non-Pech. Her children do not read her list of traditional medicinal plants and medicines even though they asked for it, nor do they read the stories that their grandfather and father told and were published by Lazaro Flores and I in 1991. I do not know what the issues are related to this. Submitted proposal for this book to University Press of  Florida, but  not accepted. Investigate issues of Indigenous Intellectual Property Rights in US and Internationally to be able to talk to Garifunas and other Honduran Indians on the advisability or not of including information in Wikipedia and republishing books we have written as e-books for wider distribution. Make contact with US Indian organizations working with issues of traditional foods and nutrition and medicine and environmental healthiness including Northwest Indian College (NWIC) in Bellingham, Washington, Center for World Indigenous Studies (CWIS )in Olympia, Washington, the Indigenous Environmental Network(IEN) and FirstNations.org.  (They all have websites.) Make some contact with US Garifunas in New York, Los Angeles and Seattle. Prepare the website with information in English for US librarians in SALALM and for people attending the Society for Applied Anthropology conference this year and next year, and also people attending the Western Regional International health conference at the UW in Seattle in April 2014. The meeting of SfAA will be in Pittsburgh, PA, my hometown in 2015  and where I worked with the Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center in 1991. Several of the articles on the blog below were inspired by call for articles of the Traditional Indigenous Knowledge Network and were put up on the blog to inform the people attending Sfaa in Pittsburgh next year. While I was working for the Council of three Rivers American Indian Cnenter I took at Community College of Allegheny County course on the Modern American Indians taught by a lawyer who worked on issues like getting sweat lodges in the prisons and the issue of how do you deal with young Indians who get into trouble with the law related to addiction issues (over 90% of all arrests of US native Americans had something to do with addiction todrugs or alcohol).

 www.healthandhonduranindiansblacks.blogspot.com

 

 

My Garifuna Midwife and Traditional Female Healer Projects With Yaya - Part I Why we did it


My Garifuna Midwife  and Traditional Female Healer Projects With Yaya in Barrio Cristales, Trujillo, Honduras and Its Ties to related projects with Miskito, Maya- Chorti, and Pech Indians  and Ladinos of Honduras and Blacks and Indians in Pittsburgh, PA.

By Wendy Griffin (2014)

Why Yaya and I did these Garifuna Midwife and Traditional Female Healer, Farmer and Cook, Storyteller and Song Composer and Singer Projects:

1. It is the law in Honduras and in 20 other countries.

            ILO Convention 169 which is ratified in 20 countries including Honduras since 1995 required the teaching of traditional technology in Intercultural Education. Midwife practices are one part of traditional medicinal plant use, which are one part of traditional technology of using and processing plants. Other traditional technologies related to plants include agriculture, processing of food for post harvest storage and eating, and teaching of good nutrition, crafts, and ceremonial plants and making musical instruments to accompany some healing ceremonies.

            ILO Convention 169 guarantees land rights to land for Indians and Tribal Peoples such as the Garifuna to land they live on and which they use for other purposes such as harvesting of medicinal plants or for ceremonies, including sacred burial of the placenta,so it was necessary to know where the plants were and medicinal ceremonies were and what they were used for to document traditional  land  and resource use and be able to argue for land rights for the Garifunas, who currently have serious land problems and which have been getting worse since Yaya and I met in 1993.

2. Need for Data about Public health Issues among the Garifunas and other Traditional Peoples like Miskito Indians

            Questions about Public health issues and safety of traditional medicinal plant use among the Garifunas-  In some cultures the way the midwife delivers the baby and especially cures the umbilical cord actually makes the baby more likely to be sick, so we reviewed what were practices to see if they were in fact “good practices”, and they were, and also as there is  an extremely high level of HIV in the Garifuna community, I was checking were midwives aware of it and taking precautions with their own health in delivering of babies of possibly HIV positive mothers.

The Garifuna non-profit organizations are in general very proactive in relation to trying to link traditional medical system to helping to identify and prevent and recommend treatment for HIV and AIDS. Even the ancestors have recommended treatments for living better with AIDS.  Of the over 100 plants included in my study and in the UNAH’s study only one plant used by the Garifunas was problematic for its use due to toxicity issues.  The Garifunas seem aware of its toxicity issues and while some older women use it to control diabetis, the main use among younger Garifuna women is to provoke abortions, reported another Garifuna female buyei. Yaya does not recommend abortive type of treatment to young women, although she does know plants so that after you take them, no more kids, and others that if you had trouble getting pregnant, solve the problem. An American woman told in the US she could not get pregnant without hormone therapy and and operation, while living in Trujillo took Garifuna treatments from another midwife, and she had two boys one at age 39 and the other at age 40. She was in India and Sri Lanka after the Tsunami, so very hard travelling, and surprised to learn she was 4 months pregnant when she got back to Trujillo and had no problem with what would have been considered a high risk first time pregnancy at age 39 with fertility issues prior to that.

3. Need for Analysis as to the possibility of traditional medicine replacing Western medicine in cases of the lack of the latter due to poverty. It is common that there are no chemical medicines in Honduran public hospitals, due to the poverty of the Honduran government and the Hondurans themselves, and by making available information about Garifuna medicinal plant medicine and traditional medical practices particularly to Garifuna nurses in the Garifuna area and teaching Garifuna grandmothers that most Garifuna medicinal plants have been in fact been  proven by the Honduran university UNAH to be effective for what they are traditionally used for, this offered a more affordable and sometimes more effective alternative for the nurses and Grandmothers to recommend to their Garifuna patients. The Garifunas have actively fought for decades for Garifuna nurses in their hospitals and clinics and for more culturally appropriate training of these nurses.

4.  Public health issues among Miskito women and young children among Pittsburgh, PA Blacks—Miskito Indian women in Honduras have the highest levels of maternal death and infant death in Honduras.  The eco-system of Miskito women is similar to the Garifuna eco-systems, maybe the medicinal plant use and other pre-natal, during birth and after birth techniques among Garifunas could help fewer Miskito women and children die.

Many of the things Garifuna midwives recommended also may serve to reduce high NICU costs and high levels of maternal and infant death in the US among US Blacks which are higher in US hospitals like in Pittsburgh, PA and Washington, DC than in Honduras. An example of “best practices” applied to traditional medicinal techniques in a situation where many Miskito women have significant barriers to access the state public medical system relating to pregnancy and birth—linguistic issues, bilingual men are often away and the subject of pregnancy and midwives is taboo for them, traditional health beliefs, including about where the placenta should be buried and who should cut the umbilical cord, extremely few state medical facilities available, doctors at state facilities are a different ethnic group and often men and are almost always doing state service so no experience whatsoever, lack of safe ways to travel to facilities while pregnant and no money to pay for transportation.

5. Problems of Intergenerational transmission of traditional knowledge as a Direct Result of Development Projects in Ethnic Areas. “Ethnodevelopment as Ethnogenocide”

            Problems of Intergenerational transmission of knowledge among the Garifunas- For a number of reasons including loss of confidence in traditional medicine or shame to use traditional medicine, issues of being “Christian” and “modern” and “educated”,  not wanting to use or study with traditional birth attendants and healers, the knowledge of traditional Garifuna midwives and healers is in danger of being lost. The Midwife in this study is now 95 years old.  If we do not do the study now, we will not have the opportunity to do it later.  These people, these resources will not be here. Also if the younger Garifunas do not learn what are the medicinal plants, they may cut them all down or kill them with herbicides, like Ladinos do and as they are taught in school, without realizing their importance.

6.We needed Information to Plan Development projects to put back what had been lost as inadvertent concequences of development projects without taking into account respect for cultural differences.

            Identified the medicinal plants and their situation to identify the need for  reforesting Garifuna medicinal plants and protecting access to them that are becoming scarce through the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras  projects and problems under Honduran law that do not protect uncultivated areas where medicinal plants often grow. These new laws also do not recognize that the Garifunas and other traditional people were taking care of and utilizing areas now called parks and protected areas as important sources of medicinal plants and other culturally important plants like construction plants, ceremonial plants, craft plants, food plants, etc.

7.  Provide Information on Clashes of Biomedical and traditional medicine practices to inform decision making on health specialists in the US and in Honduras.

            Identify clashes between Western medical practices and Garifuna practices, and the role of institutions inspired by “Development” and Christianization projects in destroying the traditional medicine of the Garifunas and the Miskitos without offering a viable alternatives for their health.  This impacts Garifunas in their villages such as US medical brigades and Honduran doctors trained in Western medicine and also it impacts the estimated over 100,000 Garifunas living in the US including over 100 living in Seattle.

8.  All Previous Studies of medicinal plants among the Garifunas had been examples of Biopiracy and done without respect either for their Traditional Knowledge Rights, nor even their needs for the information collected.

            This project was also undertaken because previous medicinal plant projects among the Garifunas such as those of TRAMIL (based in the Dominican Republic) and the UNAH were examples of biopiracy and total violation of the Garifuna’s Intellectual Property Rights and the researchers took the information about over 300 medicinal plants under the guise of helping intercultural education and then refused to share the written results with the Garifunas themselves.  The over 100 medicinal plant recipes collected in this study were published and almost all the books given in class sets to the Garifuna schools in Colon, Honduras by the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras. Funding for the publication of this book and its distribution and training to use it were provided by the Edwards Foundation (New York), American Jewish World Service (New York),  the Conneticut Honduran Disaster Relief, and the St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church (Pittsburgh, PA). Funding for the research itself was provided by personal funds of Wendy Griffin of Pittsburgh, PA (graduate of WWU, Bellingham, WA 1977 and University of Pittsburgh, 1989) with some personal donations by her sister Pam Lawrence of Atlanta, Georgia.

9. No funding available for this type of  Project, so it  was  undertaken at personal expense by Wendy Griffin because of the total indifference of the people in charge of national bilingual intercultural education project and  UN “Cultural Rescue” projects to actually incorporate information about Garifuna history and culture, including plant use and care, in textbooks and resource materials for the teachers such as the topic of culturally important plants even though ILO Convention 169 is the law and there are courses in Honduran elementary school curriculum like Agriculture (4 hours a week), Home Economics and Health (4 hours a week),  Natural Sciences (5 hours a week), Art and Drawing (1 hour a week-draw and label the plants), Garifuna language (2 hours a week), Social Studies (uses of land, workers in my community, products produced by my community, etc.) that are extremely well suited to include this type of information in the classes with the Garifuna students.  Honduras currently has a problem of deforestation which was traditionally not a significant problem in Garifuna and other rainforest Indian communities because the parents and other elders taught the younger people culturally important plants on their ways to and from and in the fields, a traditional educational system that schools and immigration and urbanization has broken down, and the information will be lost in a very short time if steps are not taken.

10.  Worldwide it is now recognized that Traditional Plant knowledge is often lost through language loss which often accompanies increased western Schooling, urbanization, Christianization, and immigration.

Language Loss Accelerates Traditional Knowledge of Plants being lost--The loss of the Pech language among the Pech caused many Pech medicinal plants not to being learned by the younger generation and the  Garifunas are one generation away from losing the Garifuna language.   While some younger Garifunas have sometimes heard of the plant “weñu” from which hammocks were made for ceremonies or  the word”buei” for a traditional ceremonially used plant or “dugunu” a traditional food, they do not know which plant or which tree or which food weñu, buei, or dugunu refers to or how to process the plant so that it can used. There are also medicinal plants and parts of certain animals including pigs, cows, boas, chickens, that are used medicinally, too, but you need to know how to process them.

 

11.  Issues of Imperfectly transmitted information about plants can cause illness and lack of transmission can result in illness and even death.

Examples, grits anemia in the US South (caused by new mothers giving only grits, but not knowing they need to breast feed to supplement the grits, too) , pellagra in the US South (caused by not knowing they needed to nixtamalizar the corn), death by eating ackee (if it is not very ripe, and processed correctly, eating ackee is fatal), causing “empacho” by feeding mashed plantains (machuca) to babies under 2 months old, etc. .

Death can result for the lack of traditional medicines and prenatal and post natal care, such as death from empacho in Tegucigalpa hospitals, death from hemorraging after birth in Honduran hospitals (treatable by strong coffee among Garifunas),  death from hepatitis  and from asthma (all Honduran ethnic groups  know plants to treat hepatitis and know how to prevent childhood asthma), death from women being delivered of 22 pound tumors in Honduran hospitals (which Garifuna midwives would have detected through massage in the fourth through ninth month of the supposed pregnancy when they were much smaller), death from diabetis and high blood pressure and gangrene which the Garifunas control through plants, death from worms and amoebas or diarrhea which all Honduran ethnic groups used to treat with plants that are native to the Garifuna area and are proven by international studies to be effective, death of the mother bleeding  after pregnancy caused by anemia which the Garifunas treat pre-natally with plants high in iron, (they may also be high in folic acid, the babies being born without brains fairly common in a study of the lives of among poor Ladino women in the Trujillo area was not reported even once among Garifunas,) etc.

12. Need for Knowledge about “Best practices” about How to handle complications of birth, prenatal care and postnatal care of mothers and infants which might be useful for other Honduran ethnic groups like Miskito women who lack access to hospital style care or even US Blacks who have worst outcomes in US hospitals than care of Garifuna women at home.

In cases of very complicated births like babies born feet first, arm first, or butt first, the baby born with its umbilical cord around its neck, twins, babies that came in and out  when the mother pushed, mothers with slim hips, in cases where the Garifuna midwife Yaya and a university trained doctor were both present, Yaya  the illiterate Garifuna midwife in every case took charge of the delivery and the babies lived and the mother lived ,while the university trained doctors either watched and admired or they gave up and sent the woman away after being in labor for 2 or 3 days.

There used to be programs in Honduran health centers of cooperation between midwives and new doctors, known as “cursillo”, part of which was to train the new doctors doing required social service in the area, where they could ask how do you handle these kinds of birth complications, and part of which was to educate midwives about issues like postpartum infection and HIV,  but these types of programs have been discontinued in Honduras, and funding for programs to deal with teen pregnancy or HIV or other reproductive health issues of traditional women is now almost non-existent, even though these problems are of epidemic proportions in Honduras.

Garifuna medicine often works in interethnic settings on the Honduran North Coast, that is white Europeans and Americans in the Trujillo area, the recent Honduran president Pepe Lobo, poor Hispanics, Black English speakers, have all been treated by traditional Garifuna medicine and gotten better or lived after giving birth. It is not just a question of faith. Most of the Garifuna medicinal plants were known to UNAH scientists as medicinal plants, from their studies among Ladinos, and they had done a review of the literature to see if other universities or Ministries of Health had studied them, but the uses of these plants by Garifunas were different in most, but not all, cases. This expanded the possibilities of the Garifunas to know how Ladinos used the plants and see if they found they worked. 

13.  How to Resolve the Issue of Very Low Self Esteem among Garifuna young people which is part of the reason Intergenerational learning is not happening and their environment is losing biodiversity.

If Garifuna young people realized the truth that the traditional medicine worked and traditional Garifuna healers and other African and African descent healers were in fact the discoverers of many medicines now used commercially either as chemical derivatives like thorazine for schizophrenia or Eli Lilly drugs for leukemia or the original cultivators of aloe vera (zabila all discovered from African healers) or aspirin (from the Sauce plant still used by Garifunas) or as processed  plant powders and extracts sold in Honduras and usually made in El Salvador such as apazote (for worms) or chichipinse (made into a medicinal soap for fungus, antibacterial and helping to scar over open wound), the Garifuna young people might have higher self esteem, might take better care of the environment or eco-systems where these plants exist,  ensure that the plants do not die out due to not being careful how they reproduce, as well as have  improved health outcomes.

14. Documentation needed for Human rights Issues and Prejudice and Discrimination and possible massive displacement of Garifunas from the North Coast of Honduras due to misperceptions about Garifuna knowledge and traditional work and their traditional economy and land use and land ownership and traditional Garifuna power structures, particularly those controlled by women. These issues affect Black people and their knowledge in general.

They could also have increased cash income if they chose to grow the plants and process them as medicine or collecting medicinal plants for making into medicinal wines or other medicines is often a paid task as younger men sometimes go and bring back the plants from the mountain or the lagoon or the medicinal fish or the makers of “Manteca” or lard of pigs, boas, chickens, cows, are paid and then the older women process them into medicine. There is some perception in Honduras, such as stated by the former President of the National Congress and later Minister of Education Rafael Pineda Ponce, that the Garifunas are contributing nothing to the country, that they are just watching monkeys in the coconut trees. (Monkeys do not exist in the same eco-systems as coconuts, and the coconut trees are all dying, but in fact the Garifunas do contribute a lot to the economy and to the health of the North Coast of Honduras of all races that live there.)

If the Honduran government realized that probably the value of the plants they are killing with herbacides which also kill the fish and affect the workers are probably of a higher value socially and economically as medicinal plants than what they are displacing the forest with or whole Garifuna communities with, they might rethink whether displacing the Garifunas and the other ethnic people is really a good idea and to the government’s advantage or not.   Model Cities being pushed by Liberatarians, Mega-tourism developments, African palms planted for Redd, selling Garifuna lands for Canadian retirement homes, drug related cattle ranching and deforestation, US banana, pineapple, and coconut companies, national parks to attract eco-tourists, the international export of frozen deboned meat, frozen seafood and fish for exports and tourists and even exported for US cats before the Hondurans get any, and throwing away for thousands of pounds of wild shrimp bycatch, militarization related first to contras and now to drugs, are some of the factors affecting Honduran Garifuna lands and resources right now.

Honduran president Pepe Lobo who left office in Janaury 2014 and who Yaya and her cousin Catalina Gil helped deliver well into this world when he was born in the Garifuna neighborhood of Rio Negro, Trujillo, Colon where his father sold pigs that Garifunas slaughtered and bought,  has been in favor of medicinal plant projects in Honduras for the ethnic groups, because he remembers that “una negrita” (a little Black woman) cut his umbilical cord and brought him safely into the world. Sometimes even Honduran presidents need help from traditional health practioners.

One example of medicinal plant project he helped are  the “Green Pharmacies” and health Clinic and medicinal plant garden of the Honduran Maya Chorti that Honduran anthropologist Adalid Martinez spoke about at the Western Regional International health Conference at the University of Washington in April 2014. President Pepe Lobo also supported traditional medicinal plant gardens among the Pech Indians some of whose traditional medicine is included inWendy Griffin’s book  “Los Pech de Honduras” which she co-wrote with Juana Carolina Hernandez Torres, a Pech healer (curandera) and Midwife (partera) and Massage Therapist (sobadora) and her husband..  

15. Maybe Documentation of Traditional Midwife and healing practices of the Garifunas can save Mothers’ and childrens’ lives, two of the Millenium goals.

 Several Garifunas and Ladinos who had their children delivered by Yaya with some complication like not breathing when the child was born due to a prolonged delivery, and she delivered the child safely and alive (in more than 70 years of delivering children she has never lost one, and only lost one mother), say if their child had been born in a Honduran hospital the child would have died, such as Geovani Zuniga who when his daughter was born not breathing Yaya got out her pipe and blew tobacco smoke on the baby and she gasped and started breathing. The Garifunas used tobacco principally in ceremonial uses. My only Garifuna friend who has lost his wife to childbirth, she has their sixth baby in the hospital, died of hemorrhaging, which the Garifuna midwives control with strong coffee, and which they prevent by prescribing iron teas and drinks while pregnant, so that the mother is not anemic. Is he alone and his six children orphans, for lack of a good strong cup of coffee? 

Are there more Black babies who die in childbirth or shortly thereafter in the US than all the wars combined, according to Honduran Katherine Hall Trujillo’s TED talk, are they dying because US doctors do not know what Garifuna midwives know about controlling  the complications of childbirth, young children’s diseases, and how to provide good pre-natal care?  Are US Black children suffering from asthma in record numbers in US cities due to the lack of properly prepared chicken fat?

16.  Help Overcome Stigmas and Misperceptions that are causing Development specialists, Intercultural Education people, and Western Doctors to not pay attention to the Traditional Medicinal, Nutritional,  Agricultural and Environmental Knowledge of Blacks, Afro-Indigenous peoples, and Indians.

If the results of Garifuna Afro-Indigenous midwives are so much better than US doctors with African Americans in the US, why aren’t Garifuna young people, Honduran teachers and doctors, or US medical school professors and students learning what Garifuna midwives know? Probably some combination of false historical beliefs that Black people are uncivilized, inferior, and don’t know anything, beliefs that all traditional plant use is witchcraft instead of separating out medicinal plant use from witchcraft or magical uses, belief that if it is not Christian it is not valid or useful and is of the devil, and the belief that only in schools there is knowledge and that which is taught outside of school by non-Western traditional peoples such as traditional Ecological Knowledge, traditional plant use and harvesting and care knowledge, traditional nutrition and disease prevention, is not important, does not even fit in the category of knowledge, and in fact if we kill all the traditional knowledge in Indians and Blacks this is a good thing, all of which are totally untrue.

A) Just one Black “Bush doctor” or healer with medicinal plants in Belize, knew 1,000 medicinal plants, which is more than all the traditional medicinal plant lore for Europe in one head.  The persecution of traditional healing beliefs among the New World Blacks under the guise of the need to Christianize and fighting against witchcraft  (obeah) has been extremely virulent. In Jamaica even after Independence Obeah is against the law, even though women Obeah doctors provided most of the medicinalandmidwife care of white plantation women in Jamaica,too.. Who knows what cures we have lost? In Trujillo they mention English speaking Blacks who made people walk in one treatment after people were paralyzed for months, probably from polio. They mention English speaking Blacks who cured epilepsy with tea and the person never had another attack.  In the US South, whites mention Black conjah women who cured thrush in babies that US doctors could not cure. Who knews what we are losing because we refused to listen? Among the Maya Chorti in Guatemala the fear of being killed as “brujos” witches during the recent 32 year Civil War in Guatemala was given as a major reason for no longer practicing traditional medicine and religious ceremonies. Among both the Pech and the Chorti there are reports of traditional healers who gave up practicing and would not teach others after joining Evangelical Christian churches in the last 25 years.

B) Traditional  healers in Trujillo has treated through massage Western white women who have been treated in Miami and in Houston at expensive hospitals and spending thousands of dollars and did not get well, and  they got better in mud huts with chickens in them and wood fires. They have treated Hispanics and Americans and Garifunas stung by sting rays and in 20 minutes they could walk, and even people who had gone weeks of not getting well at Honduran hospitals from sting ray stings, and they got better. They have treated Garifunas who got sick in New York or on ships or while working for US banana companies or were high government officials who went to the best hospitals in Honduras and had access to all the Western medicine that money could buy and they did not get well and then they tried traditional Garifuna medicine and they did get well.  And some of the Garifunas who come back from New York in coffins die of illnesses, traditional Garifuna healers know how to treat like hepatitis.

C) Some traditional  medicines Garifunas use have been tested in international settings, as noted in the book Plantas Medicinales Comunes de Honduras by UNAH Biology professors. But all have been tested in generations in local settings. How do you know that apazote (worm weed in English) kills intestinal worms (lombrices)?  Because if you take apazote tea, when you go to the bathroom you can physically see the dead lombrices.  How do you know that squash (ayote) seeds kill tapeworm? If you eat squash seeds either roasted or boiled your stomach twists and turns then you see pieces of tapeworm when you go to the bathroom.  How do you know that cañafistula kills amoebas?  If you drink milk before you take cañafistula, you will bloat up. Amoebas do not like milk. If you take cañafistula and go to the bathroom, the next day you can drink milk and you will not bloat up.   You are well from the amoebas. I no longer translate for medical brigades, because they come and give a few aspirins and a few vitamins and something to kill the parasites (worms and amoebas).   Then they are gone forever.

17.  Better Use of Scarce Foreign Aid Dollars and Tax Dollars and western style trained doctor’s time if locally treatable and usually routine illnesses like worms, body aches and pain, fever, and often childbirth treated in villages and even urban areas with local remedies.

If instead of spending thousands of dollars in airfare, in hotels, in doctors time, and teaching dependency, if the  US doctors worried about the people’s health sent $20 for Xeroxed  sheets so that the local people could know which plants to grow in their garden like sauce (willow which aspirin comes from), caña santa wine or avocado leaf tea for the anemia, oranges or lemons and sweet potatoes for vitamin A and vitamin C deficiency, and cañafistula, squash and apazote  for worms and ameobas and how to use them, the people could treat their children and their grandchildren for the rest of their lives and they would have better health and less stress emotionally and economically from sick children and other family members, that would be a much better use of scarce time and resources.

If they spent $50 on giving seminars how to treat newborns so that they don’t get asthma and growing the plants like hot chile leaves or rue and garlic or processing the chicken fat and administering it, that would be so much cheaper than sending machines and medicines to treat emergencies for asthmas, especially in a country with many places without electricity and no money for more Western medicines. Teaching women that lemon grass tea does lower fevers and that garlic does lower blood pressure gives them first aid things they can do, saving scarce foreign aid and expensive doctor’s time for things traditional medicine does not know how to do.

 Part of Honduras’s tremendous foreign debt problem is for buying chemical medicines for diseases local plants are known and tested and could be grown at home. Part of this is a manmade crisis caused by neocolonial development thinking.

18.  Local Plant Recipes often more accessible, more affordable, and equally effective as chemical treatments in hospitals, and often safer, especially for very young patients..

 I find in Trujillo that hot chile leaf tea, a cure for asthmas known by the Mayas,  prepared at home is faster and more effective than trips to the hospital for treating asthma attacks, if they occur, especially at night and on the weekends when Honduran hospitals do not even have doctors on duty.  In the 15 – 20 minutes it takes to go to a neighbor’s house who has a hot chile bush, collect the leaves, and make the tea and begin to breathe normally, in a Honduran hospital I would not have even been seen yet, if I had a way to get there at night. The remedy is safe for children under 2 and does not like a sinus remedy prescribed to my sister in Florida with the warning, “Causes death in children under 10 years old.”  Hot chiles crushed and drunk in water  or ipacina used to clear sinus infections in Honduras does not cause death and usually works. 

19. There are illnesses for which Western medicine has better answers or better diagnostic tools, but ignoring traditional medicine, which exists in every country on the planet, and how it could help cash- strapped countries or rural patients is silly and very poor planning. 

20. Also Western trained doctors need to be aware of traditional medicine, because many people will end up in the hospitals only after traditional medicine has failed, and it is also common to get diagnosed with Western doctors like diabetis and high blood pressure or backpain, and then go to traditional healers when people do not find relief.  US or Western trained doctors are also probably startled when people they identify as ill and needing to be in the hospital, and the patient precipitously leaves because somehow they find out or know that this is a traditional illness, like gubida illness among the Garifunas, and gubida do not like hospitals. If the gubida, the ancestors have made a Garifuna sick, Western medicine will not work until the person first deals with the gubida.  This happens in Los Angeles, like in the movie el Espiritu de Mi mama (the Spirit of my Mother), it happens in New York City like the case of a friend’s granddaughter or the Honduran Congresswoman Zoe Laboriel, and it had happened while Garifuna were on ship like my friend Sebastian Marin.

21. In dealing with Modern diseases, often occupational hazards of working with Western companies, even the traditional healers can play a role in supervision, in supplemental treatments, but especially in leadership roles in prevention and identification that this is not a traditional illness but rather a hospital type of illness.

There are instances that maybe only Western medicine works, but for many well known illnesses, traditional medicine is known, locally available, and is proven effective and scarce public health dollars would probably be better spent letting traditional health practioners deal with the routine worms, sinus and ear infections, fevers,  and yes nonproblematic child birth and prenatal care and much of the early care of infants and postpartum mothers and use scarce foreign exchange resources for  illnesses which local medicine does not cure or know, often modern diseases caused by working in Western economy like decompression illness of Miskito divers or renal failure for workers in the sugar plantations from what they sprayed or AIDS they picked up being sailors for US and European companies or cancer from being exposed to agrochemicals. 

But even for AIDS, the Garifuna ancestors revealed plants that dealt with typical problems of patients living with AIDS—low level infections, renal problems, thrush (candida yeast infections/ manchas blancas in Honduran Spanish), getting thin from non-absorbtion in the intestinal tract and stomach upsets, that would let them have a longer life and a higher quality of life with more energy.

The Garifunas in Honduras and even American Indians in Minnesota  have invoked the ancestors to try to get Garifuna young people or young Native Americans to take care of their health and not get involved with things that would cause AIDS or  drug and alcohol abuse. For example in Honduras there was a “radio-novela” (radio-novel) called “The Ancestors Don’t Die” to talk about how to not continue the current public health crisises of early teen pregnancy and  extraordinarily high level of AIDS in the Garifuna community.  Garifuna shaman have played an active role in learning about AIDS identification and what to do next if they think there is AIDS and recommending the use of condoms and where to find them, such as a program through EMUNEH (the Liason Group of Black Women of Honduras), and they have combined buyeis and AIDS prevention and modelling  good and irresponsible behavior and the results of irresponsible behavior like the issue of young unwed Garifuna mothers in movies they produce like “El Espiritu de Mi mama” and  “Garifuna in Peril.” See the website www.garifunainperil.com for these two movies.

22. Need for Good Data on Norms of Good Garifuna Nutrition as Related to Health, to prevent Throwing Away good practices by a lack of  Adequate Intercultural Education..

In most traditional health systems, good nutrition, good and safe agricultural and food preparation and storage practices, and growing medicinal plants were all tied up in a traditional knowledge system of which the midwife, who in the case of many people who honor ancestors is also a shaman and a farmer and a cook, is an important part of.  In groups which believe in ancestors, shaman/midwives may help receive and bring into the world the souls the ancestors send, she is in touch with the ancestors during that person’s life and lets the person know if the ancestors are causing any of his or her illnesses, and  at the end of life she helps send and inform the dying person’s soul how to reach the land of the ancestors and what is waiting for them there, if the ancestors or other spirits do not intercede and heal the person.  The UN has been concerned enough about midwifes that they have issued a report on the state of the World’s Midwives.  Some healers and midwives stop practicing because others call them witches as happened among the Pech and the Maya Chorti. Until recently “brujeria” (witchcraft) was punished under Honduran and Guatemala law of the State as people ostracized or shunned or shamed or sometimes physically attacked perceived witches by people of the churches that are founded in their communities or by police and the military.

Garifuna female shaman (bueyis) and midwives (parteras) and healers (curanderas) were also traditionally farmers, like in Africa where 90% of the food is produced by women. They grew food usually organically and kept alive medicinal plants, too, as well as magical and ceremonial plants. They were also cooks of traditional foods. The move away from traditional foods and drinks (which were often medicinal as well as providing good nutrition) towards empty calorie, low nutrition, and high sugar foods like spaghetti, pancakes with syrup, white breads,  Coca-Cola,  Kool-aid, and high salt foods like Maggi bullion cubes (cubitos magi) and Coca-cola and baloney type cured with salt meats are considered to be frequent factors in the alarming rate of  diabetes and high blood pressure among Native peoples worldwide including the Garifunas. This move is often encouraged in schools as being modern as opposed to being traditional as to being opposed as bad for their health and bad for their family’s economic situation as money often goes for Coca Cola before it goes to pay the water bill, for example in Trujillo.

The fact that the Garifuna mothers were feeding their children kool aid and white bread for breakfast, if they fed at all, was what started the Garifuna Emergency Committee’s Breakfast program that included some days cooking traditional Garifuna foods and teaching the young Garifuna mothers who did not know how to cook or grow these foods how to make them. US native Americans like those associated with NorthWest Indian College are encouraging a return to more traditional and giving up empty calorie foods as  a way to control diabetis and what Western psychology calls Attentention Deficity Disorder, which is made much worse by high amounts of sugar and sugared drinks or caffeinated drinks given to kids. 

Padre Fausto Milla who works in Western Honduras with Medicinal plants also talks to people in his radio and newspaper columns about better and more traditional nutrition like drinking lemon juice for breakfast or coconut water for breakfast instead of coffee and not eating junk food (comida chatarra). His organization INESCO (Instituto Ecumenico de Servicios a laComunidad) helped the Maya Chortis start their medicinal plant project.

  The Garifunas say drinking coconut water before breakfast cleans out the kidneys, the UNAH agrees, and I have used it to treat a Pech Indian in the mountains with kidney infections so bad he could not stand up to take a bus to see a doctor.  With that and a grass that treated the infection, by the time his friend returned 10 hours later with a shot of pennicillan from a pharmacy with no doctor or trained pharmacist, the sick man was already walking around andonly had a small dull lower back pain. If you are in the middle of nowhere, knowing medicinal plants can help the late Pech chief of Vallecito, Olancho  Don Neto Duarte said his mother used to say.

This is true. During the Truxillo Railroad time, when the banana workers got bitten by a lance de fer, they did not try to get to a hospital which was hours away, but rather to a traditional healer like the Pech or the Tawahkas, because from the time you are bit until you die is only 45 minutes with this snake, If you can not find a curandero in the jungle to help you, or you do not know yourself, you will not live long enough to get a US banana company hospital 5 or 7 hours away by train if it is still running that day.

 Yaya the Garifuna Midwife was also a prime informant for the study of what were the traditional foods and drinks of the Garifunas and also some of their medicinal uses, for projects of the Garifuna Emergency Committee like the book Los Garifunas de Honduras, Intercultural Education, and of the UPN’s “Food Security and Nutrition program” (SAN) and Home Economics classes like Anthropology of the Family and The Anthropology of Food,  and the CURLA’s and the UNA’s Intercultural Agriculture Projects. Like many traditional peoples, the Garifunas are losing access to their traditional food plants and animals and fish, to their traditional medicinal plants and animals and fish, to the plants used to make the crafts to process them, as well as knowledge about them and how to maintain them and how to grow them and pick them and store and process them, and so they are actively reforesting and setting up mini-protected areas around their water catchment basins and trying to document knowledge before these walking encyclopedias like Yaya disappear and we will not have access to the information. The Comite de Emergencia has won prizes for these kinds of projects like semi-finalist Equator Prize of UNDP, Asoka Prize for good practices after recovery from a disaster, best practices Huairou, and were board members of GROOTS. They have spoken in New York to the UN organizations and the World Bank, and spoken in India and Sri lanka about how to recover after disasters for people affected by the tsunami. While probably we can not save the whole rainforest, we were successful in motivating and organizing people to save and reforest the plants they considered important for medicine and for craft plants which are needed to process food and for construction material plants. The Garifunas purposely planted these type of plants in their protected areas like water catchment basins and near their crops which help protect both the plants and the forest cover to protect water and avoid erosion and gives them more land rights, as land that has been planted is more protected under Honduran law than land that is used for collection.  Due to the study of students about the lack of vitamin C in people’s diets, we donated orange trees and other trees which they could plant to mark the boundaries of their lands and also have vitamin C. One village decided to give them to old people as selling sweet oranges is a source of income for Garifuna women. The Garifuna organizations have tried to do projects to teach younger Garifunas crafts, but most of these young people later immigrated. Most Garifuna crafts are men’s crafts and the building of houses was a man’s job with his relatives prior to getting married. The combination of immigration, the switch to cement houses, the high price of land due to tourism in the area, destruction of the fishing by commercial fishing for export and tourism trade,  are causing havoc with traditional families and the economic opportunities of Garifuna young men which tends to impact things like AIDS and single mother pregnancy at a young age. Commercial fishing which destroyed tons of fish as shrimp bycatch  are thought by the Catholic Church and CARE’s study of Rickets (caused by vitamin A deficiency which they would not have if they were eating lots of fish) among Garifuna women and children in traditional communities to be the cause of the Rickets (huesos raquiticos) in 30% of the Garifuna children in Iriona. The Pech children had 95% positive for anemia due to the destruction of the rainforest animals they ate. The issue of Miskito men being away lobster diving has all kinds of issues in the family economic and nutrition and health of Miskito families, over and above the issue of decompression sickness. The beliefs of the Miskitos that there are terrible taboos or punishment if a second man marries a widow or an abandoned wife has serious repercussions in the economic possibilities of a Miskito single mother. The Moravian church may also have had an impact trying to get Miskito women to work less in agriculture and fishing under the “women should be at home theory”, which US Indians like the Cherokee reported in their process of adoption of Christianity. If the Miskito woman tries to adhere to these type of values, but is also abandoned or widowed, or even sick (the church says don’t consult traditional healer), she and her children can be in a serious bind.

22.  This information on Yaya’s life and how she was called to be a midwife and buyei and healer, and how she was trained in healing and in singing and in playing maracas, also proved useful in the ongoing search of where the Garifunas were from in Africa, because food recipes, African origin food plants, and some ceremonial healing practices and beliefs about how shaman are called and trained and practices, some stories and the ceremonials uses of stories, some music and dances associated with healing ceremonies, and the crafts used had African origins and some of these practices are still alive in Africa (and often in Dutch Guinea now Surinam and sometimes in the Caribbean and New York City) today.

23. The study of  Yaya’s life and that of other buyeis and singers for ceremonies also gave a lot of insight into the leadership roles of women in the Garifuna society and in particular the role of Garifuna women’s dance clubs of which Yaya’s sister and later her niece were presidents of.

 If there were minor disputes in the community they were settled by the head of the Garifuna dance club. According to Dr. Tulio Mariano Gonzales, the female head of the dance club has the authority of the mayor in a Garifuna community.  If there was a holiday, the Garifuna women’s dance club organized the celebration and often provided the singing and dancing and organized which men were doing what like drumming or leading a game. Being in good standing in a Garifuna’s women’s dance club ensured you had singers for all your life events like ancestor ceremonies and wakes.  

These women’s dance clubs also raise money and provide drink or food for important ceremonies like wakes or ancestor ceremonies. They provide help if you become sick and your family is not nearby and also help to contact the family. They help organize the planting and harvesting that is done communally, which is why after Hurricane Mitch they were an important local organization to coordinate anything done locally with. If the people in the dance club thought you were doing something wrong they would compose songs for you, and come to your house and sing to you, one of the origins of women’s parranda songs. (Men sing these types of parranda songs at wakes and end of mourning ceremonies known as fin de novenario (equivalent to final prayers in Africa). There are special times when Garifuna women sing as dance clubs at the end of the year and for the patron saint’s day, and this is a time reserved to hear the critique of the women, like “My son moved to La Ceiba and never thinks of his old mother.”  The songs of old men “arumajani” which are sung at ancestor ceremonies tell about counseling young men and what will happen if they do not listen, “my son does not listen to me. He is disobedient. They will fix him in the street and we will find his body in the mountains from vultures overhead.” 

If the Garifuna young people heard the traditional songs and stories which tackle tough questions including issues we don’t like to discuss like incest, they might make different choices in their lives. But they no longer hear these normative songs which tell you about people living right and about people living in ways that their family and friends compose songs about them to critique them, because the young people generally do not speak Garifuna, and often are no longer in the community, but rather in the US or big Honduran cities, and also if in the community the young people are dancing in the  discos to songs that tell very different values of morals, like the song I am going to sleep with the daughter and I am going to sleep with the Mama,  is part of the reason that Garifuna young people are very lost and do not have a good grounding in traditional morals, rather learn the morals of the street and of Bart Simpson (which include to disrespect older people when the respect of older people is the pillar of the Garifuna community), and so young people are wandering in many non-productive paths like drugs, alcohol, getting girls pregnant and leaving them and their children,etc. and not learning either the values of their ethnic group nor the traditional skills and knowledge of their ethnic group, but they are also not learning the new skills well enough to be able to work in them or there are no jobs where they are for these skills. and so the Garifuna young people right now are a lost generation when they get out of school, and instead of being a support and a help to their elderly grandmothers, the grandmothers have to think of how to get protection orders or locks to keep them out of their house or room, and spend like Yaya her last years in pain because her grandson high on drugs threw her to the floor, breaking her arm and hurting her hip/leg area. That grandson of Yaya is now in jail for murdering his cousin. Another grandson of Yaya who does not speak Garifuna is doing time in a Mexican prison.  One study in the US showed that indigenous people who spoke their language had less issues with drugs and addiction and the resulting crime issues. There are many reasons for that including that they heard the songs and the stories, like “If you steal watermelons, a huge giant, a kisi, will come out of the watermelon and chase you until your heart stops and you die.”  They say one of these tall hairy giants, known as sisimite to Honduran Spanish speakers appeared to the current president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernandez. Who knows if this is what helped him stay straight and graduate from school and get a Master’s degree and become President?

24. A Case Study of What Is  Development? How will you know Development  when you see it? Is Ethnodevelopment really Ethnogenocide?

If there is more disease now, if the Garifuna old people die at a younger age than before as all the Garifunas of Trujillo say, if more  younger Garifunas are ending up dead from AIDS or work related accidents or contamination or violence or drugs and alcohol,  if there is more hunger now, if there is more violence and insecurity now, the Garifunas’ resources are being lost on the land and in the sea, and the knowledge of how to process them and grow them and use them is disappearing from memory, if their language and their culture and their religion and  their very lives and communities and young people are threatened,  in what way can we call this “Development”?