Day 15: Zubi

I’ve been on a GSL trip before, to Thailand, but I had an extremely limited knowledge of Thai. Being on this trip, being able to communicate well with my host family in Spanish, makes this trip extremely special. So, I want to write about a couple of the most interesting conversations I’ve had with my host family, where I learned something surprising about this community.

 

The first conversation was one I had with my grandfather, Eliodoro, or Elio for short. He’s 70 years old, and is one of the community’s experts on medicinal herbs. Here, they use almost exclusively medicinal plants for every different condition, from stomach pain, where they have a variety of different teas and herbs, to broken bones, where they make casts out of leaves and plants. They only go to the city to see a doctor on rare occasions. Elio had one such disease where he had to see a doctor. The doctor said the disease was so bad that he would have to go to the city of Limon to get treated every week for the rest of his life. Getting to Limon takes almost a full day from here: simply too much for him, so he went to a nearby Bribri village to ask for help. There, they assured him he would be just fine, and found a medicinal plant in the forest for him. He took it for 15 days, and afterward, he was completely fine. He says the doctor was completely befuddled when he returned, cured of his supposedly incurable illness.

 

He says something similar happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Everyone in the city was insisting that people isolate, but here, they did not do the same. Many people did get COVID (though not all confirmed, since they didn’t have many tests), including Elio, but by using medicinal herbs and teas, they were able to recover quickly. Our host community was mostly unaffected by the pandemic, and people were able to go about their daily life. It probably helped that there are very few completely indoor spaces here, as almost everything is open-air.

 

These situations have led to a pretty firm distrust of Western medicine. Elio says that he feels that they have everything they need here in the forest, and that Western drugs are just more expensive versions of the same things they already have. They try to avoid visits to the doctor. My mom, Vanessa, says that if you eat well and use the medicine from the forest, you will be healthy.  I believe that they have a very good point, and they are largely correct. The life expectancy is quite high here, with a few people even reaching over a hundred years old. One elder just had her 90th birthday.

 

However, this distrust also leads to some beliefs that are less agreeable. Because Vanessa works in tourism at STIBRAWPA, she was required by the government to get the COVID-19 vaccine. She  says that she thinks it was bad for her health, and she says that she’s heard that vaccines are a plot to destroy the human race. There is a lot to be learned from their perspective on medicine, as using natural medicine has proven to be very effective, but this ideology of complete distrust seems faulty.

 

Another time, my dad, Cesar, asked me where my family is from, and I said India. He wasn’t sure where that was, whether it was in Europe or America or Asia. He asked me what countries bordered India, and when I told him about Bangladesh and Nepal, he had never heard of them before. I decided to open up Maps on his phone to better show him, and when I did, I quickly realized that this was probably the first time seeing a map of the world.

 

He was surprised to see how many different countries there were, and was very curious to see which countries border which others. He never really has to think about any countries other than Costa Rica and Panama. They have a strong community here and the rest of this area, and nothing else is really that important. This was a moment where I could really see how secluded this community is. There is something to be said about really focusing only on your close friends and family. This type of view doesn’t fully translate to my life, but this small community-based mindset does have its applications.

 

These types of conversations are what make this trip so interesting, and I look forward to more such discussions in my final few days in our host community.

 

-Zubi









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