snakebite

A friend got bitten by a snake last night. I wasn’t with him, but I was passing on my bike when he and his wife and dog came bursting out of the undergrowth trying to stop a car. Heather was wide eyed with panic, the dog was going crazy, and Cache looked like he was trying to hold it all together. They got a lift home on a truck and I followed stopping to get the snake man on the way. I was expecting us all to get in the car and drive to the clinic. But he was sitting on the grass sipping water while Heather piled green clay on the bite and on the machete cut above it. He said he felt fine.
It was dusk and they had been climbing around a fallen tree. Bad idea really. Dusk and dawn are big snake times. He said the snake had just leapt out bit and disappeared in an instant. From the description it sounded like a hog nosed pit viper: it was short, about 18 inches, dark brown with a red vertebral line, stocky, triangular head and it had been coiled up. The bite marks were about a good ½ inch apart. He had got bitten right on the ankle bone, a vein ran between the incisions. He said he felt something like a sting and looked down and saw the snake. He swiped at it with the machete and managed to cut his leg. The bite bled a lot and Heather sucked on it before running into the street. Vipers venom causes the blood to flow to the extremities, with great swelling and burning at the site. After 20 minutes Cache was feeling nothing, except tingling where the machete had sliced him. There was no swelling and he was totally coherent. His heart was fast. The snake man arrived and looked at the puncture holes and wanted to go find the snake. It was dark, no-one else wanted to go. Heather had started feeding Cache mother in law tongue (Sansevieria) and rubbing it on the incisions. The snake man said the clinic wouldn’t give anti-venom until he began to react, everyone thought he might as well wait at home. We swapped snake stories and then scorpion stories and then stories of things that had died mysteriously. And we waited. Nothing happened. The snake man said that 70% of bites were dry and this, after 3 hours of nothing, certainly seemed like a dry bite. Heather gave me a lift home. He was lucky. Snake boots from now on.

Chili Spread

I’m delighted that I can use tomatoes, chilies and ginger from the garden, all organic too!
Pound of tomatoes
3 – 4 chilies
2 inches ginger
3 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons unrefined sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ cup of red wine
salt

Finely chop tomatoes, chilies, garlic and ginger. Mix all ingredients in pan and simmer for 30 minutes until everything is soft, and the smell is overpoweringly good. Spread on bread with a little cream chess, or use with vegetables.

back to the garden

Back to the garden
It seems a quiet season. I’ve been spending time harvesting bananas and pineapple and drying, drying, drying. There are scotch bonnet chilies to be plucked too and cherry tomatoes. I made a chili spread this morning which I’ll test out on the bread that’s rising on the deck.

My weed whacker is slowly whacking its way through the garden. I can handle about an hour and a half of whacking before my eyes start to vibrate and my sweeps get faster and more hysterical. Then it’s time to stop. We really do have a lot of grass.

I have sweet peppers to plant out today and the third generation of pumpkin. I’m disappointed with the second generation, the leaves are small and the growth is slow, not a hint of the luxurious, abundant foliage of the first generation. And they seem to be susceptible to grasshoppers this time too. The seeds came from the first batch, and all the first batch came from one pumpkin. I wonder if it’s too much interbreeding? Is this possible? I don’t know if I’ll get any pumpkins from this second planting.

Joni Mitchell in my head

How does the song go, “Going to camp out on the land, going to try to get my soul free . . . got to get ourselves back to the garden”?
Today I went with friends to look at a piece of ‘the garden’ they want to buy. We drove into the hills over rutted dirt roads, pulled off eventually and walked the rest of the way. It’s beautiful back there, a different microclimate, hotter, stiller. The noise is different: the birds are louder than the insects. A keel billed toucan flew across our path, a 6 foot black and yellow snake disappeared before us. We passed the shack where the cat man lives. The shack is maybe 12 foot square and made of recycled scraps of wood, pieced together like a linear jigsaw puzzle, some had been painted long before in previous incarnations and so the house looked mottled in pinks, blues, yellows, greens. The sides we could see from the path were hung with plastic crates, bicycle baskets, little fishing net hammocks. There were cats in every available space. Kittens of various ages were scampering or staggering on the ground. Before the house was a structure with a tin roof and walls made of sewn together rice bags, more cats sat inside. The smell of cat shit was strong. The cat man appeared from behind the shack. He knows my friends by now and was full of smiles. Did we want a cat? No. But we had brought him some bread. He is old, early 80s, thin and wiry. His wide smile reveals one tooth and his eyes are a pale brown. The knuckles on his hands are huge. He’s worked all his life and clearly continues to do so, his shack was surrounded by banana, cacao, coffee, cassava and malanga.
Further on we came to the farm. We went to see Don Ulysses the farmer. Ulysses isn’t quite as old as the cat man. He is thin and wiry, with short shaven hair and a strong curved nose. His pants, like the cat man’s are held up with bailing twine. He has several teeth. He’s smoking a roll up cigarette and hacking. He has no cats but chickens everywhere. His house is a stronger shack made with posts. The lower level is storage, he lives above. Most of the space upstairs is open with a room at the back. His kitchen is outside under a tin roof. There’s no electricity, his stove is clay with a space for fire and a metal grate for pots – a barbeque. There are chicken sheds made of sticks and bailing twine. Around the house are cacao, banana, breadfruit and citrus trees.
Don Ulysses is angry and frustrated. He wants to sell his farm and has a contract with a woman we know. His farm is 14 hectares and he wants it bought in one piece. The deal is that he will be paid in installments until the end of the year. He wants $80,000 for the farm. My friends want to buy 2 hectares and have the cash ready. (They are paying $8,000 per hectare, the woman is making a nice easy profit for being in the middle.) But there are complications, she’s stalling and doesn’t have the money for the installments, he’s tied into a contract and can’t sell off a smaller parcel and two sets of lawyers are involved. It’s officially ‘frontier land’ being only 2 kilometers from Panama and that makes it all harder. As a simple farmer he doesn’t understand why it’s so complicated. Selling it is clearly difficult for him – it’s been his family’s land for over a century, but he’s getting sick and can no longer work it.
We walked out through cow pastures to the parcel my friends want. It is beautiful. Open pasture land with frequent graceful kapok and almendra shade trees. Natural springs feeding clear pools full of fish and frogs. The land is bordered by indigenous reserve – virgin rainforest for miles and miles. Looking into it was looking into darkness, dense vegetation all the way to the canopy. Their parcel is an irregular shaped field sitting on a small hill backed by jungle. There is a natural spring and a low marshy spot filled with malanga. Sitting where the house would be we looked out to forest, to the east was another pasture, to the west flatter grazing land, neighbours would be hidden from view. The sun was behind us, the house would be in shadow in the afternoon. There was plenty of room for growing a garden. Not enough for goats. It is beautiful. I was surprised at how familiar it looked – a green cow pasture with a wire strand fence surrounded by big trees. It didn’t look tropical. It looked a bit like Guanacaste, and a bit like home.

So many people here have the same dream: buy a piece of land, retreat. More and more people are arriving. Ulysses is selling his farm for a lot of money, it’s completely and absolutely unaffordable to a native. And he is frustrated because these white folks, who obviously drove and who have cell phones and whos’ pants are held up with belts won’t give him this money, which for white folks is so little. Via Campesina is a peasant organization which campaigns for land for peasants to work sustainably. I completely support it. And yet here I am supporting my friends in their purchase of this part of the ‘garden’ which will give Ulysses and his family comfort and ease for the rest of their lives but take away another piece of land from native Costa Ricans. It’ll never return to working farmland, it’ll never again be owned by Costa Ricans. Things are changing here rapidly. Ulysses has worked hard all his life, it’s his land. He can do whatever he wants with it. The world is changing, if borders are to become meaningless then land should be owned by whoever will respect and care for it. It’s grazing land, the cattle are for meat. My friends will build a house (and a cabin for guests), they will put in a garden, it will all be very green, very eco-friendly. They will drive 40 minutes to school each way.

There’s a billboard in the horse field next to the school. It wasn’t there yesterday. It advertises a development of 12 luxury villas with security and beach access and “Italian Standards”. The architects drawing shows an ugly two story blue structure with a deck, one can just make out that the car in the garage is a mercedes.
“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot, with a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot.” Sing it Joni.
“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone . . . “

Young Jack

There are a lot of street dogs here, and somehow many of them make it through life: skinny, riddled with worms, ticks, fleas, mange and god knows what else, but many make it. Everything here is tough, from the people to the horses, to the dogs to the damn mosquitoes. You can tell which foreigners live here by how tough they are, how weathered, rangy, leathery they look.

A dog has been living at school for maybe 2 months. We thought he belonged to our neighbours. He ‘s rail thin, belly full of worms, missing hair in patches. From what I can see he lives on the scraps that go to our compost. And he’s a sweet loving young dog: happy to see you, eager to please, mellow beyond words: he lets the cat eat from the compost first and hasn’t chased a single chicken. Because of his condition we asked the neighbours to pull themselves together and he disappeared for a few days. I was worried – they don’t seem to be animal lovers. But a week later he returned same as ever. The children fed him more scraps and I began to take more care of him. School has been out for a week, but yesterday we had a meeting. He appeared crying, could barely walk. He’s all swollen underneath, with several deep cuts that could be barbed wire or perhaps stones. The flesh around his genitals is inflamed, raised, leaking puss and fluid, it looks like he has an abscess at the top of a back leg. He is a mess. He wouldn’t let us touch his back end.

I fed him and with a friend tried to put a sulphur ointment on his inflammation and hydrogen peroxide on his wounds. He howled and cried the whole time. The vet came out this morning and gave him a shot for the pain and inflammation. She’ll be back tomorrow to tranquilize him and have a better look. He’ll make it, he’s a survivor. She thinks a car hit him. Someone went to the neighbours. They say he’s not theirs. This is good, he’s now free to be taken care of. I have the closest relationship to him among the staff at school, so he’s now my responsibility, at least until he is well again. He looks to me like a Jack, such a nice dog. I can’t bring him home – he has too many parasites and one vet bill is enough. And anyway he couldn’t walk that far. He will continue to live at school until he’s clear of worms and mange at least, then we’ll re-access the situation. We have several new families moving to the area – one of them surely will want a dog.

Hoss came to me when he was two months old, a month after I arrived in Costa Rica. Lady J turned up on my doorstep last May and didn’t leave. I really don’t want another dog. Hoss and LJ are a perfect pair, a third would shift the balance. Young Jack is a lovely dog and it will be easy to find him a home when he’s fit and healthy.

torcelos and terciopelos

There are many creatures here: something like 5% of the world’s animal species live in Costa Rica, and each must find its place within the whole. What to eat, where to eat, when to eat, how to avoid being eaten, how to find a mate, how to create future generations – everyone has their own niche world within the greater various ecosystems.
As a westerner, growing up in Scotland where the most dangerous animal is the rarely seen adder, (the bears and wolves hunted to extinction), I have a conditioned faith that nature is benign. And as a human living in the world’s temperate zones, it largely is: one must search fairly hard to find a grizzly or a rattlesnake or a puma.
Beyond those temperate zones nature, not man, holds the balance. (For the moment: pollution is man’s best weapon against nature and enters into areas where man hasn’t yet taken over.) In such places, man like everyone else must find his or her place. Here, on the edge of the jungle I see nature in her glory daily, whether it be the smell of death and decay from a ditch and circling vultures, to a wasp entering a hole in my chair carrying a paralyzed caterpillar, to the giant orange horsefly with the huge emerald eyes that just bit my leg. As a human at the top of the food chain it still looks fairly benign. But yesterday was book marked by two creatures who’s particular little niche world I would rather not encounter.

Torcelos (a type of bot fly) are rather nasty. The adults are large, bright green, squat and have no working mouth parts. After breeding the female catches mosquitoes and deposits her eggs on their proboscis. When the mosquito bites an egg enters the wound, soon hatches and the grub begins to grow. It lives below the skin feeding on its host for up to two months before pupating. It’s fairly easy to identify a torcelo – the skin is raised in a hard lump, usually discoloured like a bruise and there is a neat round hole, about a millimeter across on the side of the bump. If you discover it early it’s fairly easy to kill it – either squeeze it out (a knuckle size lump holds a 5 millimeter grub), or suffocate it. There are various folk cures, from tying a piece of meat to the lump, to rubbing with mashed hoja de estrella leaves to coating with gasoline. When the grub gets bigger it has to be cut out. Hoss once had one which had grown unnoticed for three weeks (he was staying with friends). When the vet took it out it was half the length of my finger, I couldn’t look, even the vet was horrified. There seems to be a season and we seem to be in it. Hoss has/had 4, clearly a heavily laden mosquito. Luckily I spotted them within a day and coated them with green oil (sulphur, camphor, citronella suspended in oil). It killed them quickly and now we are dealing with his body’s absorption of the matter, hydrogen peroxide and another green oil coating just to make sure. But Young Jack has a big one that sticks out like a third hip bone. It’ll have to be cut out. And we can’t do it yet given the pain and sensitivity he is experiencing in that region.

Terciopelos are often called the most feared animal in Latin America. They are in the viper family and are fairly excitable as snakes go – stories of them attacking rather than retreating are not uncommon. They are rather large too – the females on this coast average 66 inches (over a metre and a half), maximum recorded length is 97 inches. They have long hinged fangs which lie against the roof of the mouth. When they bite the fangs rotate forward into a stabbing position and their hypodermic needle fineness directs venom deep into the tissue. The venom is full of tissue destroying chemicals and digestive enzymes: when a human is bitten up to a third of the blood supply leaves the system and floods extremities or the intestines, the resulting drop in pressure stops the heart. In non fatal bites there is often permanent damage to the kidneys or lungs and to the site of the bite. The snakes look a little like rattlesnakes, brown with a chevron pattern of darker brown outlined in white or cream. They have narrow necks and triangular heads with large eyes and the typical heat sensitive viper pit between eyes and nostrils. They are creamy white or yellow on their underside and their lower jaw is also a pale yellow – their other Spanish name means yellow beard. And like rattlers they shake their tail when threatened, it produces a humming sound. Last night I was going to the banana box and one was lying, rather casually I thought, on the steps. I was rather taken aback. We looked at each other for a while; me trying to determine whether I could wield a machete with any real direction or effect on the steps in the dark, he realizing I probably wasn’t a threat and I certainly wasn’t prey. And then he left. Slowly, unperturbed, exploring a couple of crannies before entering the bathroom and then out of my sight. I didn’t follow him to make sure he really left. He was about 4 feet long. I like snakes, but I wouldn’t call him pretty: the markings are beautiful, but the neck is very narrow and the head a blunt arrow, he looks unbalanced. I was as close as I’d ever like to be. He was no more than 5 foot away, but down 4 steps – there was no danger. I was very very glad the dogs were sleeping inside. I woke this morning thinking I should have scared him or threatened him, chased him off. I don’t know why I didn’t, maybe that old conditioned faith in blind ignorance, maybe trust in the universe, after all I saw him at the top of the stairs.

bleuchh

I spent a large part of last night propped between two buckets. The lesson: when one opens a coconut and the water seems slightly fizzy, don’t drink it!

critical mass

I’ve just reached critical mass with my mosquito bites. That’s it, I’ve had enough. My feet are just two red lumpy appendages that itch and burn. I’ve even been bitten on the soles. I’m totally fed up with the staccato slapping of my body, the blur of smashed mosquitoes and that smoky ash residue they leave when swiped. I’m over the smears of blood. I wish I had socks. I wish I had some incense. I wish they would just curl up and die somewhere far from me. I’ve been munching raw garlic, eating ginger and chili and still they bite me, what gives? I’ve put my magic oil on to sooth the itching and it’s not working.

Green Banana Curry

Green, or unripe, bananas can be used as a vegetable, just like plantain. Watch out for juice from their skins, it will stain! Or you could do like the locals and clean your hands with petrol afterwards.

Ingredients:
A dozen firm green bananas, or 8 plantains
Water and grated flesh from a coconut
2 inches of fresh ginger
½ to 1½ inches of chili, depending on taste and type
3 cloves garlic
1 lime
1 teaspoon curry powder, or to taste
Few lime leaves if available
1 spoonful of honey, or to taste
Splash soy sauce
Oil for cooking

Cut the skin from the bananas and chop. Add to salted water with a splash of lime, bring to boil and simmer 10 minutes or until the bananas are soft, like boiled potatoes.

Meanwhile finely chop garlic, ginger and chili and cook in oil until softened, add chopped lime leaves and curry powder and cook on low heat stirring constantly for another 2 minutes. Add bananas along with some of their cooking water, stir to coat thoroughly and cook on low heat for 5 minutes. Add coconut water and flesh, the juice of the lime (if it’s organic throw in the peel and flesh too), a splash of soy and the honey. Stir well, cover and allow to simmer quietly for another 15 – 20 minutes. After cooking let it sit for another 2 to 3 hours for the flavours to fully work their magic. Can be served hot or cold.

snake in the bathroom

There’s a snake in the bathroom, what are you gonna do there’s a snake in the bathroom has it come for you? No, it came for the toads. It gave me a fright though, turning on the light and seeing a bright red snake with a black head and a yellow band on its neck searching out corners, completely unperturbed by the light or my presence. I on the other hand was rather perturbed. I hadn’t seen this one before but red, black and yellow is a coral snake’s signature and I had told myself that the single black and yellow band could be juvenile colouring. Coral snakes aren’t aggressive but they are deadly and I didn’t really want share the bathroom with one. I played with the idea of catching it but this was not the time. I wished it well and told it not to return, and kept my eye peeled.
But it wasn’t a coral snake. It was a juvenile mussurana. Mussuranas are ‘good’ snakes to have around, because even though this one was looking for toads, they mostly eat other snakes. They are venomous with rear fangs and they constrict. They attack by lunging themselves at their prey coiling around it and biting to paralyze. The incredibly noxious venom of even the baddest of the bad vipers doesn’t harm it. Scientists are studying mussuranas and the Brazilian government is considering special breed and release centres for them as a snake control tool. But surely we remember what happens to such plans (cane toads in Australia, perch in the Canadian lakes, to name just two manmade natural disasters). Anyway I wish now I hadn’t told it not to return, hopefully it wasn’t listening.

Mr. Hansel pays a visit

George came over this afternoon. He’s been threatening to for months and today finally made it with a bottle of homebrew, 3 giant avocadoes from his tree and an apple, “to sweeten your mouth”. He filled the afternoon with stories and gardening advice. George’s family came here in the early 1900s from Jamaica via Columbia. They settled with 6 other families this last stretch of southern Caribbean before Panama. They fished and they farmed cacao. That was when most of the coast was Jamaican and Mosquite – a blend of Nicaraguan Indians and former African slaves who moved steadily south until they could find peace. The Costa Rican indigenous people, here the BriBri, stayed in the mountains away from the coast. The ticos stayed around Limon or up in the hills. The life they had sounds good. They fished and hunted and put together gardens in the sandy soil by the beach: papaya, banana, plantain, melon, sugar cane, taro and yucca while they cleared the jungle and planted cacao and orchards of fruit trees: breadfruit, avocado, mango, akee, soursop, citrus, nutmeg, cinnamon. Then they waited for the trees to grow. Cacao are short shade loving trees so they cleared the bush and left the big trees. This was all virgin land, jaguars and crocodiles, macaws and harpy eagles. And mosquitoes. They brought their medicinal plants with them. Work was hard but living was easy: lobsters and crabs were so plentiful they almost walked into the cooking pot, bananas and coconuts fell from the trees into the embers. The kids too young to clear land caught dinner.

Rondon is now the famous local dish. Rondon means run down and is a stew of whatever was found that day. George kept telling me, “everything was fresh, there were no iceboxes, no chemicals, it was all fresh, all organic, all good for the body”. There’s no recipe.
Take fish, crab, prawn, lobster or a combination and cook with chopped plantain, taro, yucca, breadfruit, pumpkin or sweet potato, in whichever combination you have that day. Add the water and flesh of a grated coconut, chopped ginger and chili, black pepper and salt, perhaps a little nutmeg or cinnamon and cook slowly until it smells done.

weed whacker

I did it, I finally bought a weed whacker. There’s a lot of lawn in the garden, despite our efforts to lay beds and plant things, there’s a lot of grass. We have a ‘gardener’, a very lovely 19 year old indigenous 7th day Adventist. But he works full time for a hotel an hours cycle ride away and we get him every other month when we heckle the hotel enough. It’s not a practical arrangement, and I’m very bad at heckling. The grass wasn’t quite as high as an elephant’s eye, but easily 5 times taller than any lurking fer-de-lance and it looked overwhelmingly messy. I’d been intending to buy a weed whacker for at least the last 2 months, it had become a bit of an issue.

Firstly there was the petrol or electric question. All of the men who cut grass for money have big heavy petrol powered machines. They look like samurais as they also wear heavy ground length leather aprons and a mesh mask covering their face. The whacker is supported by straps which adorn shoulders and wrap around waists. Cycling round a corner and being met by a grass cutter holding his still running (people do so like to waste petrol here) engine singing, surrounded by clouds of gas smoke and a green haze of slowly descending vegetative particles, his small form enlarged and given great authority by his ‘armor’, is to suddenly realize and give thanks that one lives in a peaceful country and this is not some warrior out of control with blood lust, but a local earning $14 for sweating several litres under his garb for a whole day’s work.

As I would be doing the ‘whacking’ I wouldn’t need such a big heavy –or expensive – machine. And as there would be no need to do the entire lawn in one day, I didn’t need so powerful a motor. Petrol powered gives more freedom: one isn’t limited by cord or the need for power outlets. But I found myself unable to buy a petrol machine, simply because of the petrol itself. I know this is hypocritical and I claim no superiority in being a bicycle owner: I miss driving, there are times when I wish I had a car. And I know that most of my food arrives here thanks to various petrol powered grain harvesters, delivery trucks, fork lift trucks, trains, ships and buses. And I know that the weed whacker itself would be made out of parts that themselves were possible because of the petrochemical industry. All this I knew and the argument went back and forth in my head when I could have been thinking other things. The clincher was that all electrical energy in Costa Rica comes from hydroelectric stations and this was easier for me to justify in my ignorance. Of course it then turned out that the electrical models were more expensive because of the power cords.

It really has taken me two months to finally come to the decision to buy a small electric model. I not only went back and forth between the two power sources, but also whether I should really own a whacker, whether it wouldn’t be better to hire or borrow one, or simply pay someone else to cut the grass. In the end convenience won out – as is so often the case. The power cord was more expensive than the machine. I have 40 metres of cord, which should I think be long enough, given there’s a house at either end of the garden. The cord came as just that and I bought plugs for either end. It’s been years since I’ve wired a plug, years since those university days where fuses were often blown and tinfoil kept whole apartments running. The copper wire was surprisingly thick and set me off into another mental spin: I’ve recently finished ‘Conversations with an Archdruid’ which follows the brilliant conservationist David Bower on three trips into the wilderness. The first trip was to a mountain he was defending against the opening of a copper mine. As I wired the plug images of pristine mountains and copper mines drifted in and out of my head. The fine wire bundled into stiff copper rope in my fingers had come a long way, and from where? What processes had it undergone to end up in the jungle of Costa Rica? The electricity here is very simple, cables and wires are in clear evidence hanging from trees, dangling from roofs, miles and miles and miles of it, all tucked inside black or white plastic. How much ore, how many mountains had become empty pits? The only point to such questions is to raise awareness of one’s impact upon the land. The wire is already here, the damage done so that I can have power in the middle of the garden. But I have direct control over my purchases: perhaps a petrol powered machine would have been a better choice. Perhaps paying someone else would have been more appropriate.
Nevertheless, all doubts cast aside, I can now cut the grass. And when the rain stops I shall.

variation on 'unclean' women (see next post), or planting with the moon

I was telling Moreno, the local purveyor of all things good including information, stories and intelligent conversation, of my consistent inability to grow a certain plant. He asked me when I was sowing the seeds. I told him I’ve tried at the new moon, the full moon and in between. I’ve tried sowing it dry and sprouting it, I’ve tried in sandy soil and in loam, it’s not happening.
“But when in your moon?”
“What?”
“You know, there’s a time when women can’t make bread or mayonnaise.”
“What?”
He blushed.
“What? . . . You mean my period? What, I can’t make bread or mayonnaise during my period?”
“No, it doesn’t work.”
I laughed. Where does such an idea come from? Is it somehow related to the BriBri / tribal belief that sets women apart at this time (and gives them a break from the ordinary)? Periods must be the antithesis of pregnancy, does this make them anti-fertile times and so unproductive? I would have thought it the opposite. I tried it; the bread is just as fine, the plant still doesn’t grow.

cacao farm, or cultural homogenization

We took the kids to a cacao farm yesterday. The farm belongs to an indigenous family and they farm their hectare organically, of course. They have cacao, coffee, bananas and platanos. The mother, Petronila, led us through the process of bean to chocolate, which the kids, living here, knew quite well. (For the process see earlier post on Cacao.) What was more interesting was her sharing of the indigenous BriBri way of life. What she shared was related to the cacao, as food source and medicine: cacao was taken at every meal, the cacao paste and the cacao butter were used on the skin to nourish and protect and both were taken medicinally.

If one cut oneself one should take some cacao, rub it on the thing that did the cutting and then pack it into the wound. For example, if you cut yourself with a machete you rubbed the cacao first on the machete and then on your cut. I’d heard before that chewed cacao leaves were good for cuts and stings. This involving the offending item in the cure is interesting – it elevates the treatment from first aid to folk medicine and adds a twist to the doctrine of signatures. Suddenly one is aware of the consciousness of all items, regardless of whether or not they are sentient. It indicates the consciousness level of the person who has been cut: they have a direct relationship with what cut them and in order to heal they need what harmed them. Everything has power to harm and to heal – and this removes the whole victim mentality.

Pregnant women could not step over weapons or hunting or fishing equipment, nor could they eat the flesh of jaguars or eagles, nor could they touch blood. To do so would create problems with the child.
During their periods women were “unclean” and could not be touched. They did not participate in the general household tasks: cooking, cleaning, preparing food. During this time they had to eat from special leaves formed into bowls which had to be kept outside – if anything or anyone touched these leaves, or anything belonging to the woman they would get parasites. In general if anyone touched an unclean person they would get parasites.
After childbirth the women were also unclean and had to leave the village for a month. They would make a special shelter in the forest and wait for the shaman. During that time they would eat cacao with herbs and rub cacao paste and cacao butter onto their skin and that of the baby. When the shaman came he would bless the woman and child and she could return to the village. But she would still be unclean for another month. On her return her family would bathe her with herbs and rub cacao onto her skin. The shaman would visit the family and perform a ceremony with cacao and herbs. For a month the woman had an unclean mouth and could not talk to anyone, every afternoon she had to go to the river and clean her mouth and the baby with herbs. This ritual would ensure that the baby was healthy and free of any bad spirits.
And then our storyteller added: in 1965 the missionaries came and told us that Jesus had died to save us all, the blood of Jesus made us all clean. After that women went to the hospital to have their children.
Religion got the BriBris. And by religion I don’t mean their own spiritual understanding of the world. I mean western organized religion. Religion and alcohol got the BriBris. It’s odd how the story is the same the world over. That they go hand in hand marching into tribal communities for the last, what 5 centuries? That the people become shameful of their nakedness and cover up – the mother and her beautiful daughter were wearing more clothes than I’ve seen in a long while, covered neck to ankles in synthetics. That communities become divided between those who get the new faith and those who get the new drug. That trust in their medicine slips away and is replaced by blind faith in someone else’s pills. Old ways of life, centuries old, fall away in one generation. That which harms you no longer has the power to heal you, instead the doctors a day’s travel away can heal, but they need something in return, and suddenly within a generation a people go from an integrated, harmonious, sustainable lifestyle, to one where money must be earned.
The land that gave freely before now belongs (what a concept) to someone else and the people must move: there are indigenous reservations. These reservations are home to the ‘poorest’ people in Costa Rica. Forty five years ago they needed no money, now they are the poorest, least educated, most alcohol dependent and unhealthiest segment of the population. When a way of life disappears so radically – the way one prays, thinks, communicates, eats, raises children, maintains health it leaves an enormous hole and into this space comes church or alcohol, or both. Is it progress? Is it really what Jesus would have wanted?


Petronila came down from the mountains when she was an adult, there are still Bribris living in the mountains, there is still a shaman. Am I being a social luddite? Is my own bias against organized religion colouring my thinking. Sure. Is it better to have western medicine – no more “unclean” women; better to put new chemicals into bodies, the earth, the water; better to wear more clothes; better to have money; better to have an “easier” (note: not simpler) life with more time to devote to church and recreation drugs? Better to be educated in a school; better to learn reading and writing and someone else’s history? Last year we had an indigenous boy in the school. His family was illiterate, he had no sense of letters or numbers: the symbols were only that. He drew beautifully, his ability to observe nature and replicate it either in sound or on paper was stunning. He was different in a school full of different, unique, international, free children (post:Different, 2007). He was quiet, serious with a weight of awareness around him that was so out of place in school. He had no idea that he couldn’t do what the others could and was proud of everything he did. His mother became sick and they returned to the mountains; the medicine the doctors gave her had failed. I was sorry for him to go, I’ve never seen a child be so conscious of leaving classmates, but glad that we weren’t going to strip him of his abilities and self belief, replacing it with what our lifestyle requires us to know.

I asked Petronila if she would teach me what she knew. She looked at me blankly, “I don’t know anything about the medicines now.” I asked her if she had thought of writing down her stories, she said the university had books on BriBri traditions. I will try again, I will ask her if she will tell me and I will write them down. 1965 wasn’t so long ago was it?

miserable, except for the chocolate

It’s been raining for 3 days. It’s cold. I did my laundry on Sunday and none of it has dried which means I’ve been wearing damp clothes or dirty clothes since. My towels are damp. The electricity is on and off. The mosquitoes somehow have flourished. I have some mystery raised blister rash which is incredibly itchy and is spreading over my arms and hands. I have a cold with a racking cough, despite consumption of copious amounts of raw garlic. But I do have a big bag of organic chocolate crumbs.

conversation over coffee

“Last week I woke up with bat shit in my hair.”
“Yeah?, . . .yesterday I woke up with a tick on my top lip.”
“Nasty. This morning I woke up with a dead gecko stuck to my chest.”
Okay Shaun, you win. Jungle life.

solstice

Solstice passed with a delicious yellow moon caught in the branches of the fig. It was dark by 6:20, making a difference of one hour of daylight between the winter and summer solstice. I guess we’re only 8 degrees north of the equator. I spent the day thinking of family and friends and wishing them joy in their living and peace in their being.

nitrogen fix

Just finished my nitrogen delivery.

When I lived in my cob house I had a composting toilet, basically a bucket and a big bag of sawdust. It worked beautifully. I haven’t tried it here, though think about it often; I know several people with pit toilets, but as yet haven’t quite finished the loop on that one. And it is a loop: I really think it all started going downhill when mankind stopped dealing with its solid waste. To remove what every other living thing contributes to the soil and plants which feed us, and instead to dump it, treated or not, into our water takes us so far out of the natural order, sets us apart in such unhealthy ways. Yes, I could go on. In cultures where the loop is complete and waste is returned consciously to the land – well let’s just say the vegetables grow bigger. We have a septic system here with a leach field so somehow something is returned, but not much.

I don’t eat meat or fish and I eat from the garden mostly with grains and legumes added. I don’t take medication of any sort and I’m not a drinker, so what I could ‘contribute’, is certainly compostable. Maybe that’s the project for my upcoming 3 weeks off school. I already have an outdoor bathroom, it’s not such a stretch.

Unless there’s a guest, no one pees in the toilet. The boys just wander off for a moment in the garden, I on the other hand have a series of rotating buckets. Just before dusk the bucket’s contents are diluted with an equal amount of rainwater and fed to the plants in rotation. The nitrogen, potassium, calcium and trace minerals, the trace garlic, ginger, chili and whatever else is present directly benefit the plant and I feel good about contributing, and saving the water that would be wasted in flushing. The only thing I’m careful of is not splashing leaves or stems, if it’s too strong it can cause burns under sunlight. The buckets get a vinegar rinse and are left to bleach out in the sun: sunlight is an excellent bleach.
The average household flushes the toilet 14 times a day and the average flush takes 11 litres of water. That’s a lot of water. I keep hearing how the next oil crisis will be a water crisis, let’s start saving now and helping out our plants at the same time!!

While I’m about it, we also compost all our toilet paper, just add it to the compost pile along with everything else. We use unbleached, biodegradable, recycled paper, goes right in, perfectly simple, completes another part of the loop. Why flush it, what a waste of carbon. Offset your carbon footprint – compost your toilet paper!!!!!!!!

In many cultures – Costa Rica included – people don’t flush paper, instead there is a little bin or bucket beside the toilet into which all the paper goes. When it’s full some people burn it (I guess that’s not so bad if you put the ash in the compost), most others bag it and it goes to the land fill (is that carbon sequestered?). If the bin is emptied regularly there’s no smell, and really there’s no mess (fluids evaporate quickly even in this humid climate). It makes perfect sense to compost it. Try it for a week. Be part of the cycle.

tomato

Just picked the first ripe tomato from the garden. This is the sole tomato on a long spindly volunteer plant that must have come from the compost. We have a compost pile but we also feed kitchen scraps directly to beds and individual plants – it all breaks down so quickly with the humidity and heat, and countless insects. It’s a brave little tomato this one, rather scarred, not the prettiest, it certainly would get passed over in Safeways, but it made it: the plant fulfilled its genetic task, from that one lucky seed came, well I’m not sure, probably 80 to 100 others. Almost seems a shame to eat it. It was seeing the little volunteer in a bed of bromeliads and ornamental taro that inspired me to try tomatoes in the cottage garden. And now the first generation are heavy below fruit and the second generation are coming along nicely behind. I’ll get a knife, this moment must be savoured. Yep, very nice.

I've been tagged

Kanak, who has a great blog, http://terrafarmer.blogspot.com, tagged me. This is a new one for me, there are rules :) here they are:

Link to the person who tagged you.

Post the rules on the blog.

Write six random things about yourself.

Tag six people at the end of your post.

Let each person know they have been tagged
by leaving a comment on their blog.

Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

here are my 6 random things:

I type with two fingers;

Pacha Mona means earth monkey which is my chinese horoscope;

my favourite food is dried dates;

I'm beginning to find multi-tasking pointless;

I'd like to be a full time gardener;

the other week I ate a tick - I thought it was a chocolate crumb, it tasted foul.


the blogs I'd like to tag are:

allotment underground

the greening of gavin

urban subsistence living

indoor gardener

urban homesteader

La Ferme de Sourrou