How Honduran Garifunas Use Traditional Indigenous Knowledge of Plants to Start Small Businesses
By Wendy Griffin 4/25/2015
I
recieved through the Traditional Indigenous Knowledge Network a request to
provide information about how Traditional Indigenous Knowledge can be used in
an entrepreneurial way as a way to help small businesses form. I work with
Afro-Hondurans and the Garifunas in particular were organized in a
Non-Governmental Organization The Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras
(CEGAH) which I helped work with their projects and helped them get funding and
helped them identify problems for which we could develop fundable projects.
We won international prizes including
semi-finalist for the UNDP Equator Prize for development in a tropical area
while still protecting the environment, the Asoka Prize for Best Practices of
recovery after a disaster (Hurricane Mitch, a Force 5 hurricane), Best
Practices Huairou, the worldwide association of NGO’s for women formed in
Huairou, China, and Best Latin American Grassroots Environmental Video at the
Tulane University Latin American Environmental Film Festival for our video with
Witness.org “Garifuna Holding Ground” denouncing an illegal highway built from
the Garifuna villages on the Coast into
the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, an UNESCO World Heritage Site.
International
Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 169 on the Human Rights of Indigenous and
Tribal Peoples requires that traditional indigenous technologies be taught as
part of bilingual intercultural education. In Africa only one country has
ratified ILO Convention 169, but 19 countries have in Latin America and the
Caribbean including some that have significant Afro-Latino or Afro-Caribbean
populations like Honduras and Dominica. So on one hand I have worked to
identify what was that traditional technology, which usually involved the
processing of plants and animals, or growing the plants and protecting the
animals and aquatic resources, as a consultant for bilingual intercultural
education, and on the other hand I helped develop small business ideas and
helped them get funding or training to do them.
One of my personal interests is
to help the Afro-Hondurans reconnect with their African roots, which requires
detailed documentation of crafts, foods and drinks, medicinal plants, religion,
traditional stories to be able to know where in Africa these came from and what
is their history in Africa. My research
on the African origins of Afro-Honduran foods is almost complete, so I do know
something about African foods, traditional medicines, and crafts and what is
being done as far as small businesses.
Aspects of Plant
Technology
Food
plants
Craft
plants
Traditional
medicine plants
Firewood
trees
Trees
important for the materials with which to build houses.
Food
Plants
Part of
CEGAH’s help was to just to help people recover their agriculture after
hurricane Mitch so that they could eat. We got them seeds or cuttings or roots
of traditional plants that they grew, some of which had been becoming scarce
before the Hurricane. Eventually we worked on “seed banks”, but since most
crops grown by Afro-Hondurans like yams and cocoyams, sweet potatoes,
manioc/cassava, bananas, plantains,
sugar cane, do not grown from seeds, we did community plots up on the hills as seed
banks so that in case the lower down crops were destroyed by flooding or
hurricanes due to poor drainage, the people would have seeds with which to
start over. These plots were usually
cared for by Garifuna women’s dance group members. They use the food produced together such as
for selling traditional soups to pay the musicians and the kerosene for lamps
for all night dances, to help old people who never had children to help them
when they are old, and some for their own family’s use. The women all had their
own agricultural plots, too which we helped them restart after hurricane
Mitch.
We did
some training like how to make organic fertilizer, how to use crops in the
community such as madriado leaves mixed with molasses to make nutritional
bricks for cattle, another Garifuna activity, medicinal plant seminars
including what the Honduran university said really was effective, that you did
not need to go to health clinic or spend money to go to a faraway hospital for that, and with my
Home Economic students we did a study of what were common nutritional problems
in Honduran communities, which included the lack of vitamin A and vitamin C and
anemia. So we taught the teachers that sweet potatoes and mangos were high in
vitamin A and how to grow them, and that oranges and lemons, are high in
vitamin C and how to grow them, and how to get the children in their classes to
learn to grow them by making them plant one or seeds and documenting how they
grow as class assignments. Sweet potatoes will grow in almost soil and do not
require a lot of room, so we tried to help with these kinds of problems.
We
studied what people grew and found that high in iron things they grew included
the leaves of the cassava which Hondurans usually throw away and avocado leaves
which if you boil them to make tea will turn the water bright red they are so
high in iron. In Honduras only Garifunas drink avocado leaf tea. The Home
Economics students tried to develop recipes for the yucca or cassava leaves
that Honduran people would eat. So for example, the favorite recipe they came
up with is cut up the cassava leaves and add them when you are making scrambled
eggs instead of the flower of izote, a traditional edible flower used in
Honduran cooking.
Examples of way traditional medicinal plant
knowledge is turned into some small profitable business or sideline
In
Honduras three plants—squash or pumpkin seeds (all varieties kills tapeworm),
apazote (worm weed—tea of the plant including the leaves kills all intestinal
worms except tapeworm), and cañafistula (seed pods kills amoebas) have been
clinically proven to kill all the major forms of parasites that cause childhood or adult
diarrhea, a leading cause of death. The
seeds of the squash or pumpkin people usually just grow, but they could be
sold, cañafistula is sold as the seed pod it dries and transports well. The
Salvadorans dry epizote or apazote worm weed and sell it in small packages,
including on buses for about 50 cents US.
In Honduras people print up small books, like
I bought one for $1 with recipes for 20 plants in it, and photos of the plants
on the back, and people on the bus bought them and tried them at home for
anemia, worms, avoiding infection if you get a cut, diabetis, high blood
pressure, cough, nausea during pregnancy (drink lemonade), acid indigestion
(drink lemonade), fever (lemon grass tea, called fever grass in Bay Islands
English), asthma, diarrhea due to bacterial infections (albahaca de monte in
Spanish, basin in Garifuna, basil in Bay Islands English, wild marjoram in
American English) common diseases in the community that can cost you a lot of
money if you have to treat them with chemical imported medicines. Many Honduran
women say that taking iron pills that
they give in the health center when pregnant make them nauseous while eating or
drinking foods high in iron do not. The
plants the Garifunas give for women low in iron also may have folic acid as
none of the Garifuna babies are born without brains, caused by low folic acid,
but at least 700 babies a year are born to Ladina women without brains.
Skin infections,
especially insect bites that children scratch and then they get infected, are
very common in the tropics as are skin funguses similar to athlete’s feet. In
Honduras there is a weed that grows in a variety of climates that is both
anti-fungal (one of its names in Spanish is mazamora, the Spanish name for
athlete’s feet and related funguses) and anti-bacterial. In El Salvador they
make that weed into a soap and sell it in Honduras in botanical stores which
sell herbal remedies. The Honduran university reported good results using this
soap to control skin infections as well as the plant which can either be
applied directly or boiled and wash with the water. At least 5 medicinal plants
and also sulfur in Honduras are made into soaps and sold in pharmacies again
around 50 cents a bar.
One of
these Honduran soaps is made from rosemary.
I was in treatment for years in Taiwan and in the US for a vaginal
infection. It eventually developed into PID which meant that I could never have
kids. Lots of money on travelling to the doctor and medecines and tests. When I
was in Honduras I developed it again and I thought Oh No. But a girl who worked
for me had said the nun who sells the medicinal plants said to try rosemary,
which two packages of rosemary in Honduras costs 60 cents US. I tried it and in
two days and it cleared up, not another day of problems.
So
people make money with medicinal plants by 1) selling the plant to their
neighbors or medicinal plant sellers, for example rue must be used fresh, so
you sell the whole plant, while the Pech Indians collect the seed of the vine
chichimora used to treat diarrhea in young children, 2) making a soap or
shampoo from the plant (see the video of Red Comal on the Internet and you can
see the women making aloe vera shampoo and soap in a small company and then
their farm belongs to Red Comal and the other farmers who belong to it can buy
their aloe vera soap and shampoo and the women can buy the other farmer’s beans
and coffee and traditional hard sugar, 3) making a tea and selling it in
packages like lemon grass tea for fevers or hibiscus tea for poor apetite or
surecy tea for diabetis, 4) processing it into cough syrups like onions, 5)
making it into skin creams, 6) making small books and telling people how to use
plants they likely already have access to like how to use chile leaves to treat
asthma attacks, 7) one Honduran Garifuna shaman Don Salamon Lino made a deal
with a man who wanted to make capsules of traditional Garifuna plants to treat
illnesses in St. Vincent and so Don Solomon Lino told him a few medicinal plant
recipes and each year the man in St. Vincent sent him some money from the sale
of the capsules. I gave my healer friend Yaya small gifts of money and copies
of the books or studies I did for her children (she could not read and was
blind half the time I knew her) to thank her for telling me how she worked as a
midwife and about medicinal plants. 8) making medicinal wines and selling them.
In Trujillo Garifuna young men get paid to go and bring wild medicinal plants
such as those that grow by the Lagoon and in the mountains, and then women,
both Hispanics and Garifunas add rum to the plants and sell guifity a
traditional Garifuna herbal wine. 9) Being a medicinal plant seller either in a
shop or door to door or as a medicinal plant stand in Central Park or in the
market. In Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, the Honduran university
identified 90 medicinal plants commonly being sold in medicinal plant stands,
not including food plants that are medicinal and the herbal plants turned into
medicines like passionflower pills for helping people sleep,traditional cough
medicines, herbal soaps, etc. One Hispanic woman, conscious that it is
inconvenient to travel with liquids, sells the medicinal plants for guffity in
a bottle with the instructions on how much rum to add and how long to let it
sit before you drink it, and both she sells them, and has Garifuna young men
also selling crafts to tourists to sell them and they get a commission.
Medicinal plants might be soluable in water so you make teas or infusions, they
might be soluable in alcohol so you put them in rum, they might be soluable in
fats so that you put them in creams (pomadas) which in Honduras traditionally
can be made from beef tallow, pig lard, boa lard, fowl fat, etc.
The Maya
Chorti Indians of Honduras have opened green pharmacies that sell medicinal
plants, traditional medicine clinics that include both traditional Honduran
massages used to treat various ailments and plant medications, and a botanical
garden. In the archaeological ruins of Copan Ruinas Maya Chorti Indians offer
medicinal plant tours in Spanish and I have paid to take one. I have promoted
doing medicinal plant walking tours with the Pech Indians, and the Garifunas
and done tour guide training with both about their medicinal plants.
Food
plants as sources of income
1)
people can sell the plant products directly without processing-coconuts, sea
grapes, krabow fruits (nance),oranges, manioc, sweet potatoes. In one project CEGAH did with sweet oranges,
the community decided to give the old people the orange trees so that not only
could we solve the problem of low vitamin C in the children but the old people
could have an income from selling the oranges which in Garifuna communities
sell for 5 cents a piece. We were also planting oranges because under Honduran
law if a land is not cultivated then it is national land and can be given to
someone else, so to make land where the Garifunas had other things like palms
for their roofs, we planted some orange trees making the land cultivated land
and thus more protected under Honduran law.
2)
people process the plant and sell the resulting food or drinks- cassava bread,
traditional breads,cakes, and puddings and cookies, fried plantain or banana
chips, fruit juices, fruit juices frozen in plastic bags called charamuscas in
Tegucigalpa and Topogigios on the North Coast. The mouse on the brand of small
plastic bags in Honduras is the mouse from the old Ed Sullivan showwho was
called Topogigio, homemade ice cream, rice milk drink, etc. In Honduras these
can be sold by walking sales people (vendedores ambulantes), by sitting or
standing on a corner and selling food, cooked meat, coconut bread, etc. or from
the home, especially frozen things are sold from home. This might be one of a
variety of things sold like soft drinks, water, etc. Being located in front of
a school is considered very good as the students and teachers get hungry and
thirsty and parents send their kids to school with some money and they buy
during breaks or after class.
Some
Garifuna things they make have been tried to be packaged professionally such
making cassava bread and putting margerine and garlic on it and baking it. This
is broken into small pieces that fit in plastic and have a paper label on top
and are sold under the Numada (My Friend in Garifuna) brand. The Garifunas make
the same coconut candies in brown sugar and ginger that they make in Ghana, and
these have been been packaged to have white cardboard under them and plastic
over them so that they travel better. The Ladinos of Honduras make a variety of
jams like mango jam or pineapple jam or lemon marmalade and wines like
pineapple wine, pineapple vinegar, mango wine, blackberry wine, and candies
including tamarind candies, pickled vegetables that are sold in small stores.
There are big companies in Honduras that make plantain and banana chips, but
Garifunas will often buy them in small stores or walking salespeople who make
them at home, put them in little plastic bags and staple them to a piece of
cardboard. Selling like this is know as ristras in Spanish and local spices
like allspice and imported spices are also often sold as plastic bags that you
pull off of a ristra.
There
are Garifuna traditional foods that are made from traditional flours that are
African flours. One is porridge made from either green banana flour or plantain
flour or Saban banana flour. In Kenya and Tanzania this banana and plantain
flours are used to make thick porridge or thin porridge, similar to corn pap in
South Africa. Some companies like WEDO are having Kenyan women make the banana
or plantain flour at home or in cooperatives and then exporting it to the UK or
the US. One part of the market is Africans or Caribbeans living in the US or UK
(Known to economists as the nostalgia market), but part is being sold because
many Caucasian people are developing allergies to wheat called celiac disease
and so people need to cook with non-gluten flours like banana or plantain
flour. Brazil is experimenting with a good recipe for banana flour
spaghetti. In places like Nigeria yams
were dried and made into flour. Yam powder as Yam flour is called is being sold
internationally. Cassava can also be dried like this and pounded into
flour, from which the porridge konkantee is made of in Ghana. Konkantee in
Honduras is the Bay Islander name for
banana flour porridge, probably the older recipe. There are machines that grind
manioc/cassava/yucca which the Honduran Garifunas are now using to process more
cassava bread, which they generally sell as walking saleswomen, often in a
different town than where the bread was made. A few Garifuna cassava bread
cooperatives have been started to try to supply cassava bread to supermarkets
in the biggest cities in Honduras where thousands of Garifunas live. Attempts to do that and export cassava to US
Garifunas has not worked.
I don’t know if the attempt has been made to make
yucca powder that US Garifunas could cook the cassava bread in their own home
in the US. I think I was told there is yucca powder in US speciality stores.
The people who made corn into the type of
nixtamalized corn flour that is used to make tortillas, the Maseca
company, so that women did not have to grind the corn with corn grinding stones
one Honduran woman commented, “They made money from the night until dawn, it
was so popular.” The Honduran who developed the process and
marketing for frozen plantains so that you just buy them add them to a
vegetable soup for Hondurans and others living in the US won a prize as
entrepreneur of the year. Hondurans use bitter oranges to treat meat before it
is cooked. They say it takes away that refrigerator/freezer taste. Goya sells
bitter orange juice maranade for meat (naranja agria) like $4 for the juice of
two bitter oranges. Bitter oranges are easier to grow than sweet oranges and
both the leaves (antibiotic) and the fruit (juice is antidiarrheal) are
medicinal and I have tried to talk to people about growing them for the
Hispanic market in the US, there are now over 50 million Hispanics in the US,
this is not a small market, but so far without success.
The
Tanzanian government has the booklet how to make hygienic banana and plantain
flour on the Internet, with the idea that rural people make it so that it can
be sold in Tanzanian cities where people would like to give their children
banana or plantain or manioc porridge, but do not have the access to drying
these things which takes about 3 days in good sun.
3)
Traditional food restaurants and food stands—The Garifunas have tried doing
traditional Garifuna food restaurants, sometimes in combination with other
businesses like a traditional bread store, a Garifuna craft store, an ice cream
store, a Garifuna Museum and Art Gallery. For example in La Ensenada the
Garifuna women had little palm thatched huts on the beach where they sold
traditional Garifuna fried fish (which their husband or other men in the
community caught) cooked in coconut oil and tajadas, slices of bananas or
plantains that are fried. (Tajar in Spanish means to slice), and they grew the
bananas or plantains and made the coconut oil, which can be sold separately
also, although there is currently a disease affecting the coconut trees.
Traditional foods like grilled meat, grilled plantains or corn, can be sold hot
on corner stands. Garifuna women will cook foods appropriate for a lunch and
then just at lunch time sell food on the street. This and barbecues like selling barbecued
chicken are popular fund raising techniques for groups who want to do
something, like an activity for the fair.
Crafts
Many
crafts like gourd musical instruments, gourd bowls that can be painted, gourds
cut for earrings, coconut shell polished and made into jewelry are a way to use
craft plants as a way to make money to sell as crafts. In the US they are
selling in professional music stories marracas made of plastic instead of
gourds. I am sure the ancestor spirits will not come with plastic marracas, but
I can not believe that you can play good salsa or merengue music with plastic
marracas. I am very interested in the
sale of black rag dolls in traditional clothes, and I have given workshops on
how to make them and a few women did, before the Garifuna museum closed. For
rural people, crafts are usually the
second largest source of income after agricultural products.
CEGAH did work on giving classes on making
wooden crafts, other NGO’s in the Garifuna area have given classes on making
basket crafts from a vine and CEGAH worked on teaching how to reforest the
vine, and CEGAH donated sewing machines and helped women in rural Garifuna
villages start sewing cooperatives, principally to make school uniforms and
sheets and spreads and pillowcases for beds. We took photos of all the crafts
and wrote about how they are made and did a book on this. We are still working
on teaching marketing and promotion and distribution of the crafts. Garifunas
in Tela and in Trujillo have started their own craft stores, others sell as
walking sellers on the beach, which is quite successful as people like to buy
the craft as a reminder of having met a Garifuna, and some sell their products
to Hispanic or foreigners to sell with other souvenirs such as Garifuna dolls.
Sometimes people will combine products that they sell like my shell rattlers
that Garifunas use when they dance Mascaro I bought from the craftman who also
usually sells Garifunas CD’s and videos.
Pulperia Franklin in the Garifuna
community Guadelupe mostly sells food and soap types of things but they also
sell Garifuna crafts,and in the Mosquitia the MOPAWI store mostly sells food,
but they also sell the traditional hair oil the Miskitos make batana. Garifuna
and Foreigners paintings and books in Tela sell well in the restaurant near the
beach Luces del Norte. You eat while looking at the paintings, you look at the
books while waiting for your food, and when you finish eating, sometimes you
buy books, paintings as well as pay for Honduran style food and drinks. They
will make traditional medicinal teas for you at that restaurant and you are
travelling and suddently get sick which I have found very helpful. It is owned
by a Hispanic who used to be married to a Canadian.
Managing
community forests so that the members can buy firewood or sell firewood is
hard, but Garifuna women did traditionally sell firewood. Now they have lost a
lot of their firewood and have to buy it. We have worked in the reforestation
of vines and trees for crafts including mahoghany, for food like coconuts, for
stabilizing the beach after the coconut trees died like cocoplums and
seagrapes, for architecture like the wood from the yagua or royal palm, and
with medicinal plants, including particularly those for diseases Garifunas
believe in but Western science does not believe in, like plants used to prevent
or cure the illness caused by the vapor of dead people like if you go to a wake
or a funeral or one passes by.
If we
plant a forest like mahoghany, laurel (from which the spice bay leaves comes
from) or cohune palm, under Honduran law it is a private forest and can be
protected from encroachment, while natural forest, anyone who cuts it down is
owner of the improvements, which can be sold, even if they do not own the
land. Our forests sometimes search multiple purposes
like the forest above the water projects helps protect the quality of the water
and the quantity of water and protects it from encroachment, but we also moved
the vines used to make Garifuna tools for processing cassava for making cassava
bread to grow under the trees in the forest above the water project (they like
water).
This
encourages people to leave the big trees as the vine will grow 90 feet tall,
and then someone can make some money harvesting it and making the craft to
squeeze the poisonous juice out of bitter yucca, and then the women can make
money from selling the cassava bread, and they can all eat cassava bread and
drink water and there will be water to bathe in and fish in. We found people
protected the forest more if the trees were something they thought useful, like
the people in Southern Honduras were going to cut down the cashew trees planted
to stop deforestation, until they learned about 8 different ways to process
cashew fruit and cashew nut and the bark of the red cashew fruit tree is
excellent for curing diabetis when sugar problems first appear, so then they
did not cut down the cashew trees for firewood, but rather processed the fruit,
nuts, and bark. This was part of my goal in finding what were the useful plants
of the Garifunas, because people will work to take care of them, to plant them,
to not cut them down, to give them a little land if they think, I or one of my
neighbors or my children or grandchildren will need this plant.
Visual
Products of Crafts or Food or Their production that can be sold
Post cards
of people making or selling crafts, agenda books with photos, notecards of
paintings of people making, using or selling the crafts or the food, videos of
people making crafts or using crafts or making musical instruments and playing them for music, Museums with
crafts and/or videos about making the crafts, to which you charge admission and can offer
tours, books about the crafts, the painters or craft people, illustrated
children’s books about how to make certain foods or crafts, cookbooks, are all ways to make money related
to craft and food plants. The Pech Indians have also done a play of going to
the healer to be cured of snake bite and the ceremony and the Garifunas have
made plays to which admission is charged and were shown around the world, and
have made movies which included doing ancestor ceremonies for healing which
they sell.
