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”?
