Public Health Challenges Change Among Indians and Blacks in Honduras and in US

Public Health Challenges Change Among Indians and Blacks in Honduras and in US

By Wendy Griffin

Although the health problems identified by doctors in the Wikipedia Medical Project exist in Third World Countries, local public health officials and/or local Indians and Afro-Hondurans often identify other things as larger concerns for public health. In this article there will be a brief summary of these problems and then in subsequent articles there will be more in depth analysis of the problems.

1. Death by homicide.  This is the number one cause of death in Honduras. In the Dept. of Cortes where San Pedro Sula is, and also the maquila industry and the banana company Chiquita (previously United Fruit and Cuyamel fruit), death by homicide has been the number one cause of death for at least the ten years.  Honduran newspapers estimate that 70-80% of public health dollars in that department go to attend machete wounds and bullet wounds of people affected by the crime problems known generally as “la inseguridad” (the insecurity of life and of property).  That the high level of homicide in Honduras is directly related to some US policies will be explored in a separate article.

2.  Malnourishment. This can be caused by loss of land to farm, restrictions or loss of access to forest resources like wild game and fish and materials to make crafts to sell.  It can be caused by immigrating to the city where not only is food scarce, but so is water and what money one gets often goes to provide somewhere to live that most people in the countryside have for free.  It can also be caused by eating badly like substituting Coca Cola, white bread, pancakes, cornflakes, for high protein and vitamin rich foods like beans,rice, tortillas, and grain beverages traditional in Honduras. Types of malnourishment include rickets in Garifuna children due to the loss of fish because of commercial overfishing for export including a significant part for cat food, feeding tourists shrimp (and throwing tons of fish away as shrimp bycatch) and lobster and conch, anemia in Pech Indians due to the lack of wild game they traditionally ate, Kwashikor, caused by a total lack of food, among poor Lencas and Ladinos in Honduras and Chortis in Guatemala. Deaths of literally starving to death have been reported among the Lencas of Central Honduras and the Chortis of Guatemala,and tuberculosis medicine not working because it requires a diet of 1,000 calories a day to work and Pech Indians did not meet that. Diabetis which is quite high among Garifunas as well as high blood pressure from too much salt have reached alarming levels.  This malnourishment is often combined with poor sleep habits, economic and familial stress, sadness and desperation, and use of drugs and/or alcohol, which are standard recipes for  crisises in mental health. The problem that many Ladina women in the Trujillo had had babies born without brains was partly a nutrition issue because they were not getting enough folic acid,but it was also a lack of knowledge issues that local Garifunas know plants to eat and drink to prevent anemia and lack of brains in babies, but the women did not ask and did not participate in local methods of pre-natal care neither with mid-wives nor with doctors in Hospitals.

3.  Contamination or Pollution as a risk factor. Agrochemicals, mining chemicals like cynanide and mercury for processing gold. The first indication of the fact that there were slaves in the Florida tomato industry was that a lot of women who spoke no English and little Spanish were showing up in medical hospitals giving birth to deformed children, which made the health workers wonder where they were living and under what conditions.  That story is told in the book Tomatoland. The rich people who grow sugarcane in El Salvador and Nicaragua are given taxcredits for having environmentally friendly industries REDD  but in fact at least 8,000 workers in Nicaragua have renal insufficiency due to agrochemical exposure in the sugarcane industry spraying fields from airplanes while the people were working, the same as Tomatoland, and that is why they are dying. In Honduras the banana workers have won a case against Dole for the agrochemicals used in controlling banana diseases.  The whole model of successful productive agriculture in the tropics model was set by banana monoculture and it is proving unsustainable. The use of contaminations that affect bees are thought to threaten the whole food chain.

4. Changes in the seeds  and contamination of crops as a risk factor—Traditional seeds in Central America were good seeds in that they met the people’s tastes of what they liked to eat and good, they stored well, did not need high inputs such as agrochemicals, they did no thave to buy new seeds every year. They planted several varieties each year to ensure that if one variety failed, another would probably not die, because it was less susceptible to drought, or funguses or certain types of insects.  First trying to introduce “improved seeds”,which almost always fail in Honduras, and then with hybrid seeds which can not be replanted the next year which they do not tell the farmers, and now with genetically modified seeds which people think there is more food allergies now like issues with gluten because the new seeds are bad for us while the old ones were good, are making people especially Indians very concerned andthey are fighting to protect their seeds.

5. Death or Illness when accessing traditional Knowledge would have saved the person. Failures in intergenerational transmission of knowledge like traditional medicinal plants, crafts, or how to make houses from local materials after hurricanes, how to get water if there is no deisel for the generator because of loss of the plants or access to the plants, how to keep water clear so fish can live in it, how to get the forest to regenerate, how not to overhunt or overfish, immigration, urbanization,   loss of traditional languages, and the overemphasis of knowledge taught in western schools to the exclusion of knowledge in the local communities, and the destruction of native religions,some of which is caused by emphasis on being “modern” and not being “traditional” and not participating in or interacting with people of pre-Christian religions.

6.  Industrial Accidents or Deaths while being involved in work for Western businesses--merchant marines, miners, carpal tunnel in maquiladora workers, decompression sickness among Miskito Indians.  The high level of AIDS among Garifunas is directly related to having immigrated to New York city, then the epicenter of AIDS, and for being sailors or merchants marines so they could AIDS in the best ports of the worlds, and the spread of AIDS and penicillin resistant gonorhhea (known as Flor de Vietnam in Honduras) among Honduran prostitutes by US soldiers who vacationed weekends on the Coast or were active in the Mosquitia and Trujillo due to Contra related activities.

7.  Addicition related problems with alcohol or cocaine, marijuana, heroin, including AIDS through shooting up with tourists, and homicide related to drug deals gone bad, or being part of being a gang. Drugs and Alcohol are also often involved in situations where HIV is transferred and in family violence. It also affects the family’s economy, such as there is less money for food if more goes to alcohol. Gambling, including playing the lottery, is also known to put a strain on local family’s economies.One woman worked from 3 am to  3 pm almost every day selling bread, but almost all her money went to buy chica lottery tickets. Women have left men because all their salary,thousands of lempiras as a painter, went to buy chica.

8. Natural disasters are being made worse by human actions. Deforestation contributed to the severity of Hurricane Mitch’s flooding in Honduras and silting up of rivers caused by erosion after Hurricane Mitch plus still more deforestation has made even moderate storms significant disasters in Honduras. The erosion also contributed to the killing of the Cuyamel fish in Eastern Honduras and the conchs and coral in the Bay Islands. Deforestation of Honduras’s few Indian controlled areas is leading to a decline in rainfall enough to affect the access to water in Pech villages for example and makes agriculture untenable where before it was common. Loss of traditional knowledge and loss of wild game and fish and natural resources is part of what makes disaster recovery so problematic now.

9.  Wars, often undeclared, arriving to the Indian’s and Afro-Hondurans areas has affects on the people, the number and usability of resources, and the women who get used as prostitutes, and often left either as single Moms or with sexually transmitted diseases. That minority people make a majority of armies in most countries has generally held true throughout time, and they are used as cannon fodder, yet often see no benefits from these wars. In the US merchant marines or soldiers or sailors who have families overseas, but the worker dies while working in the US, the family, the wife and minor children get nothing from Social Security and if it is  work related accident the family living overseas  is often uncompensated, even if the person involved is a US citizen.

10. Family economies always difficult, but they  are put under additional strain by people made sick or dying because of accidents related to work or from HIV/AIDS or from people trying to immigrate and dying on the way or killed in New York or Los Angeles.  The caregiving of people sick with HIV; or of orphans from HIV/AIDS, or of paralyzed lobster divers or banana company workers or diabetics who get their feet cut off, means not only that person does not work, but the caregiver, often several caregivers, all unpaid, have to take care of them. They are also put under great strain and often physical danger having children or grandchildren involved with addictive behaviors.

11.Sometimes changes brought by development projects actually worsen health. While it seemed like a good idea to give people cement houses after disasters, replacing their mudhuts with a palm leaf roof and a ventilation space between the roof and the house,andcovering where the wife cooked, in fact more women and girls get sick from smoke inhalation and smoke in the eyes in these types of houses without chimineys,more than get sick from malaria notes the stro-ca.org website. Also the smoke served an important purpose of controlling the insects in the seeds over the stove, so  without the space or without the smoke if the projects provides chimneys, then the seeds get all eaten by bugs. (improved seeds get eaten faster than traditional seeds farmers report), putting the family more at risk from hunger. The people lost the traditional space to store some traditional kitchen implements and quit making some traditional foods, which seems to have worsened their health by doing things like eating more white flour and other foods high in sugars and low in nutrition. The closed roof in a cinder block house in 90 degree heat makes the older women with high blood very hot and their blood pressure goes up and they have to go to the hospital.

Dependency of someone coming to give them medicine as opposed to growing it themselves like apazote for worms  or squash seeds for tapeworm or cañafistula for amoebas means when they have no money or no health brigade is nearby, they do not have either the plant, nor the medicine, nor the know how to resolve the problem and sometimes they die or are very sick when nearby there are plants to cure them. Teaching people that areas should be clean “limpio” without plants, is the opposite of what is good for health, that if there are plants then there is the possibility of curing the disease.

 

Some Basic problems that Affect the Public health of Honduran Indians and Afro-Hondurans

 Loss of land affects nutrition, it affects access to medicinal plants and it breeds stress and sadness.  Community gardens among the elderly Hmong in Seattle helped all of this as they grew their own plants to treat their illnesses. Loss of land can be caused by creating parks for tourists on top of traditional subsistence lands, due to selling, forcing to sell, or even giving away of indigenous or Afro-Honduran lands to others who people feel will give it a  better social use (export agriculture, mines, tourist developments, etc.) , putting indigenous lands underwater due to hydroelectric dams (for which the local people usually are not compensated) and urbanization and immigration. These losses are often caused by legal means which the government claims more rights than the local people to the land. Due to inoperable court systems these cases sometimes end in murder or popular uprisings.

Loss of resources-wild animals, wild fish and aquatic animals in fresh and salt water, wild birds, forest trees and plants, water,  as well as agricultural plants affects native people’s diet and culture profoundly, and because many believe the spiritual owners of these take revenge it often affects their health.

Loss of traditional knowledge, loss of traditional values which leads to Honduras having the highest homicide rate in the world, loss of traditional languages, loss of ability to make a living in the traditional economy.

No respect for their human rights, not even the basic right to be left alive in peace, no respect for their land rights, no respect for their rights as workers, no respect for cultural or linguistic rights, and no ability to find recourse under the law. Lack of any regimen under Honduran law to protect traditional indigenous knowledge, a general problem internationally. See the book from Purich Publishing on protecting Indigenous Intellectual Property Rights. 

Often historically the same people who do not want to recognize one right for one group, say workers’ rights for Blacks or Hispanics or land rights for Indians, or the right to not die as a result of physical or cultural genocide, these same people often have not wanted to recognize any of the rights to any of the other races they are dealing with.

 Some feel this is the basis of a Pirate economy, that it is possible to make more money if you can just not pay the workers or not repair damages to the environment or the workers, or steal ideas and then make money on them and then pay little for the materials, so that you can keep the money and the idea.

This actually is not a traditional Honduran value where it is more common to hear people say, “I would not ruin my good name to grab  L100”. ($5) I am poor but honest (honrada).”  Traditional songs warn that “if young people do not listen to advice of their elders, people will fix them in the street and we will find their bodies by the vultures flying overhead.”  Traditional stories warn if you are greedy (codioso), other people will be envious, and you could die badly.  But young people did not hearthese warnings as they do not speak the language and they were in school and so they got the values of the street just as I warned 20 years ago in the first seminar on Values Education in 1993 in Trujillo, sponsored by the UNAH.

A Ladino woman outside of Trujillo who was very poor observed that if she had money, she thought she would spend it on better things than rich people seem to. As I reflected on what my family’s friends and their acquaintances spent their money on, various cars, crystal meth, binge drinking at expensive hotels, smoking marijuana and playing video games instead of going to college, paintings, extra houses, boats, expensive vacations, women, expensive vacations, it seemed maybe she had a point.

Other people spent money on the stock market, even though by law in the US money in the stock market can not be used to grow factories and jobs. The most common charity for rich people are endowments for universities where they studied which is then often invested in the stock market and millions of dollars are lost on nothing, similar to spins of roulette wheels. The book Empty Houses also shows what one rich woman who had a similar amount of money as John D. Rockefeller, inherited from investments in copper mines, spent her money on--houses she never visited, on dolls and doll houses although she had no children, and basically died without anyone knowing she had lived because she spent all her money on herself, and it did not even make her happy or healthy. That the top 20 billionaires own more money than the total income of 47 poorest countries in the world, makes us wonder was it worth it to reach that level of wealth, and hurt th