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”?