Combining Traditional Wisdom and Modern Science

by Paul Jeffrey

Sixty years ago, Luisa Gaitan's mother explained to her how certain plants around their house in rural Nicaragua could cure illness and keep the family healthy. Then came the 1950s. Northern pharmaceutical companies flooded Central America with new drugs, and Alka_seltzer signs cropped up in even the smallest villages. The years passed, and Ms. Gaitan's memories faded.

"Then the day came when there was no money to buy drugs, so we went back to the fields looking for plants," said Ms. Gaitan, 65. "There were no other alternatives. We had to return to old times to seek to recover the old wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers."

Ms. Gaitan began to pool her knowledge with other women in El Portillo, a dusty village of 134 families an hour south of Managua, the country's capital. The women realized their knowledge was incomplete, so they sought help from the Center for Integral Health Education and Promotion, a Nicaraguan organization that specializes in the recovery of traditional medicine.

With a grant from the Women's Division of the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries, late last year center staffers began a series of workshops in El Portillo, helping the women identify common medicinal plants and how to use them. The women's first home remedies were simple concoctions designed to relieve coughing and other common complaints.

Xenia Chevez, an educator with the center, said the workshops combine what remains of traditional wisdom with modern scientific methods. The center works with scientists from the National Herbarium at the Central American University in Managua in identifying helpful plants and investigating why they work. Ms. Chevez said some plants are effective only at certain times in their growth cycles, and others must be carefully processed to assure chemical properties are preserved.

"Not every home remedy is scientifically acceptable," Ms. Chevez said. "We merge empirical knowledge with scientific studies in a way that benefits those who have been largely excluded from the benefits of so_called modern medicine."

Publicity from drug cartels has made the center’s task more difficult, Ms. Chevez said.

"The propaganda of the pharmaceutical transnationals has taken root in the consciousness of the people," she said. "Women who work with healing herbs are often accused of witchcraft, although that's slowly changing as more and more women return to healing plants as a way to maintain their families’ health.

"The high price of chemical medicines is helping us get people's attention. Once we have their attention, then with education, we can help them understand that natural medicine is valuable, effective and pleasant."

In El Portillo and countless other villages throughout the Nicaraguan countryside, families have little or no access to health care. It's part of a general impoverishment of the poor since the war with the U.S._directed Contras ended in 1990. While fancy hotels and shopping malls rise in the nation's capital, a decade of peace has not translated into progress for rural residents.

Burdened by a huge foreign debt, the government has been forced by international lenders to cut back on services to the poor. Government_provided health services, day care and

credit targeted at small farmers are distant memories. The democratization of land tenure achieved in the 1980s, during rule by the Sandinista National Liberation Front, has steadily eroded in the last decade as small farmers have been forced to sell their properties. This reconcentration of land in the hands of wealthy farmers -- a sort of agrarian reform in reverse -- has left rural residents even more vulnerable.

Ms. Gaitan was one of the residents of El Portillo who obtained land during the Sandinista Revolution. She and her husband work hard to grow fruit and vegetables they sell in the capital. Yet most villagers aren't as well off.

According to a survey conducted by the women of El Portillo, four_fifths of families live on less than $1 a day, and 57 percent of the village's children are malnourished. The survey revealed high rates of diarrhea, respiratory problems and skin infections.

The health problems are symptomatic of a larger social and economic shift.

"During the revolution, these women became somebody," Ms. Chevez said. "Yet today they've been marginalized anew, excluded from progress, relegated to be nobodies once again. Their health and the health of their families are one indicator of that."

Ms. Chevez also works as a consultant to a community_based health program in San Francisco Libre, a marginalized Nicaraguan village north of Managua where Women's Division funding has helped women take charge of their own health care. Nan McCurdy, a pharmacist and United Methodist missionary working in San Francisco Libre, explained the impact of the natural-medicine project there:

"It has brought self_reliance to families struggling to remain healthy. They have become relatively liberated from western, pharmaceutical_based medicine and have taken their health care into their own hands."

The projects in El Portillo and San Francisco Libre, while primarily focused on health, are part of a larger struggle.

"The women are in charge of the projects," Ms. Chevez said. "They provide the ideas, the initiative, and the resources. They aren't going to resolve all their problems, because they live in a world where globalization is making them poorer every day. Yet they enjoy some space where they can make change. Recovering ways of traditional healing is a significant step toward broader social change in their villages."

Paul Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary in Central America.

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