Garifuna Traditional Care of Women and young children in Honduras-WRIHC 2014 Poster

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 These Midwives?  --Poster project at the Western regional International Health Conference, Seattle, WA April 2014

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.

Abstract 250 words to here

Presenters:  Wendy Griffin and Nilda Gotay

Sources of the Statistics

Statistics that Honduran maternal and new born health outcomes are better than these in the US for African American mothers and children is from Katherine Hall Trujillo’s TED talk, available on video on Flickr.com Katherine Hall Trujillo is an Afro-Honduran living in California who began a Birthing Project to help save the State of California money in expensive  new born care and then became involved in the tragedy of how many African-American  young babies and mothers die in the US.

Statistics that Miskito women have the worst maternal and newborn health outcomes in Honduras is from MOPAWI staff worker Walstead Miller, a Miskito man, who was coordinating a Miskito women’s program in Cauquira for MOPAWI (Mosquitia Pawisa—The Development of the Mosquitia). MOPAWI is a developmental and environmental  agency in the Honduran Mosquitia. 

Statistics that Afro-Indigenous Honduran Garifuna midwife Yaya has significantly better maternal and new born health outcomes than the national Honduran average, and hence  than US maternal and new born statistics for African Americans in the US is from Wendy Griffin’s study  in Yaya: La vida de una curandera Garifuna (Yaya: the Life of a Garifuna healer).

About the presenter

Wendy Griffin, a graduate of Western Washington University (1977) and the University of Pittsburgh (1989),  is a specialist in bilingual-intercultural education who has volunteered with Honduras’s bilingual (Spanish-indigenous languages) intercultural education programs since 1987. She is the co-author of 6 books published in paper, including “Los Garifunas de Honduras:  Cultura, Lucha y Derechos bajo el convenio 169 de la OIT” (The Garifunas of Honduras: Culture, Resistence and Rights under ILO Convention 169), over 300 articles on Honduran ethnic groups and several manuscripts in US and Honduras university libraries including, “Yaya: La vida de una curandera Garifuna” (Yaya: the Life of a Garifuna Healer). She currently writes for the online newspaper HondurasWeekly.com and splits her time between the US and the Garifuna and Pech  neighborhoods of Trujillo, Honduras. She was recently in Seattle to donate rainforest Indian (Pech, Miskito and Tawahka)  and Garifuna crafts  and extensive documentation about them, including her book Los Pech de Honduras (the Pech of Honduras)  to the Burke Museum at the University of Washington before the destruction of the rainforest and the beach habitats and the loss of traditional knowledge made it impossible to have the crafts made.

Wendy Griffin’s research was done partly with the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras (CEGAH), a Garifuna grassroots development NGO in Trujillo founded after Hurricane Mitch,  which is the co-author of the “Los Garifunas de Honduras”(the Garifunas of Honduras). CEGAH has been internationally recognized for its exemplary work in working with women after disasters (Ashoka Prize, Best practices Huairou),and in doing development projects while at the same time protecting the environment (semi-finalist Equator prize of UN Development Programme), and by Garifunas as doing development in keeping with the Garifuna culture, instead of something imposed from outside, or worse doing development by getting the Garifunas off their Coastal lands to give it to people who will “do something productive” with it, like logging, tourism, cattle ranching, African palm oil, export bananas, etc., forced assimilation or forced immigration to the US where over 100,000 Garifunas now live. Equator Initiative of UNDP did a video of CEGAH (Comite de Emergencia Garifuna) which is on Vimeo.com.

Garifuna health related projects done by CEGAH include helping coordinate a nurse trainingprogram sponsored by OFRANEH which included the training of Garifuna nurses in traditional medicine as well as western medicine, seminars on medicinal plant use, reforesting scarce medicinal plants,  representing the Garifunas at regional medicinal plant conferences, participating in  and coordinating some of the workshops for the medicinal plant study in “Los Garifunas de Honduras”,  publishing it, and donating it to all the schools in sixteen Garifuna communities in  Colon, Honduras and coordinating teacher training about it, working with groups in Trujillo of  HIV positive Garifunas or that work with  Garifuna young people, sponsoring volunteers from the University of Massechusettes Medical School to visit Garifuna health clinics, fighting for land rights of the Garifunas for where the medicinal and artisanal and construction  plants grow and helping to coordinate the showing of the movie Garifuna in Peril, which includes the themes of  traditional Garifuna health practices and love and young people in the time of HIV in it.

Wendy Griffin has also been exploring the issues of why young Garifuna women are not learning to be midwives, why Honduran doctors no longer consult the older midwives, why Garifunas, both men and women, in general have not been learning the most fields of Garifuna traditional medicine—healing with plants and animals, massages, bone setting, treating snakebites, or being a midwife,  and why the Garifuna knowledge of plants and traditional medicine is not being taught in Garifuna schools which have had authorized bilingual intercultural education programs since 1992.  Another issue she has been interested in is why there has been no funding available for this type of cultural exchange between Garifunas and Miskito women  and whether  new technologies such as “Go to meeting” or Internet pages with recommendations for traditional care of pregnant women and new babies  and if setting up Documentation centers with Internet by satellite and solar panals in the areas of  Honduran traditional peoples  or doing videos of  traditional health practitioners and their recommendations for care would help. The international  lack of respect for traditional indigenous Intellectual Property rights has actually hindered research in this area of Garifuna and Pech traditional medicine use.

With Doña Clara and other Garifunas and the Pech Indians she also has explored the issue of cross cultural use of traditional medical practioners, which was until recently extremely common in Honduras. One example is the doña Clara and her cousin were midwives for the birth of the recent Honduran President Pepe Lobo, a Spanish speaker or Ladino, whose family lived in a Garifuna neighborhood on Trujillo when he was born. The Garifuna and Pech female traditional healers who live in Trujillo (which has a government hospital) have treated even White Europeans and Americans  and Spanish speaking Hondurans of illnesses by traditional means, after Western hospital  medicine failed or was unavailable,  even though  these people did not believe it would help. Another aspect of cross cultural encounters is when Garifunas who believe in traditional causes of illnesses meet with US doctors either through medical brigades to Honduras or when the estimated more than 100,000 Garifunas in the US  or working as sailors on ships out of US ports go to the doctor in the US for care.