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.