How Honduran Garifunas Use Traditional Indigenous Knowledge of Plants to Start Small Businesses

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.