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With such an abundance of food-producing plants here in the Toledo district, there is always a new food experience to be had. Gomier is an old friend from previous visits, and the proprietor and chef at his small restaurant by the sea (here's a nice piece about him from the Esperanza Project). He prepares vegetarian and fish-based dishes, and is often credited with providing some of the best meals available in Punta Gorda.

Jillian and I were lucky to get together with Gomier for a lesson in preparing cashews. It's a fairly simple process, but unique and fun in its own way. Best of all is at the end you have cashews to munch on!

These are the raw cashews in their shell. Raw cashews contain a toxin related to poison ivy which can be removed by fire...

With the help from a fire below, the cashews slowly catch on fire and blacken. Beware of the smoke ~ as I learned over the next few weeks, the toxin is burned off and present in the smoke. An unpleasant rash, very similar to poison ivy, results ~ for me the rashes lasted for about two weeks.

This is Gomier handling the burning cashews. Here, he is removing them from the fire, as they are now burning on their own.

Here in southern Belize, where I'm slowly working on dissertation research, it's hard to miss the influence of the Church on the local populations. There are a variety of churches trying to position themselves as the faith of choice here in Punta Gorda and in the villages of Toledo. Roman Catholics seem to be the most rooted here in the region, as evidenced by the many RC schools scattered throughout the district. However, Protestants continue to make inroads, and are quickly becoming a force in religious lives of many.

Earlier this week, on March 8th, countries around the world celebrated International Women's Day, a global day recognizing the economic, political, and social achievements of women around the world past, present, and future.  Such a day turns our attention also to women's needs, which are not being met and to the inequalities being faced by women internationally, in particular women in the indigenous communities around the world.
 
Remedia works with indigenous women in Toledo, the southernmost district of Belize, which is both home to the largest indigenous population in the country, and the highest poverty rates in Belize.  Indeed, Toledo is often referred to as "the forgotten district."  Indigenous women in Toledo face particularly limited income-generating opportunities, though their daily work seems to never cease.
 
Women in the Maya communities have long been the keepers of certain areas of traditional knowledge, including medicinal plants and traditional medical treatments for women's health and home remedies for children's ailments.  These days female Maya healers are numbering very few in Belize.  The women most knowledgeable are getting late in their years, and young Maya women rarely have the opportunity to study with knowledgeable elders remaining in the community.
 

Doug here - happy New Year to all of our friends and supporters!

To kick off the new year, I thought I would share some quick updates with some things that are happening with Remedia. Jillian is currently down in Belize continuing to lay the groundwork for some of our great projects that we are getting started down there. She has been there since just before the holidays, and we are all looking forward to hearing about the new developments that she has going. 

I am currently in Tampa/St Petersburg, Florida busily finishing the details of my stateside pre-research PhD obligations at the University of South Florida (USF). I should be able to hit the ground running in Belize sometime in the early summer of this year. In the meantime, I have been working on some projects here in Tampa. Last September, I began a research project looking at the role that botanicas fill, primarily in terms of alternative health care, in Tampa. Working with a partner from USF, we have interviewed a handful of botanica owners, and have plans to begin interviewing their customers. We have a paper written on some of our preliminary findings that has been accepted at the annual meetings of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Merida, Mexico in March of this year. I will be there to present that work along with a paper on our work this past October with Maya healers during the Maya Day Celebrations at Tikal. I will share the abstracts for those papers in a future post.

Besides the botanica research, I am also working through the video we captured during the Maya Day Celebrations. Keep an eye out here and on our youtube page for more videos from that exciting work!

I hope everyone is doing well - here's to a safe, productive, and happy new year for 2010!

~doug

The Garinagu (singular and adjective - Garifuna) are an afro-indigenous ethnic group living primarily along the Caribbean coast of Central America.  The Garinagu are descended from West Africans brought to the Americas to be enslaved.  They escaped a shipwreck in the Caribbean and intermarried with an already mixed Amerindian group, the Carib-Arawak people, living on the island of St. Vincent.  These Amerindian people were comprised of Arawak women and Carib men, from two distinct indigenous groups originating in South America, who migrated independently to the Caribbean.  The people resulting from the intermarriage of West African, Arawak, and Carib, were the Garinagu.  Europeans distinguised the Black Caribs from the Red or Yellow Caribs, who were not descendents of intermarriages with West Africans.  In 1797, the British permanently exiled the Black Caribs to the island of Roatan, off the coast of Honduras, and from there they spread to mainland Central America.

Earlier this year, in March, I attended the opening event of the 4th Annual Maya Day Celebrations, hosted by Tumul K'in Center of Learning.  The Celebrations lasted 13 days, which correspond to a spiritually significant number for the Maya.  The Celebrations began with a traditional Maya ceremony at the stunning ancient temples of Lubaantun, outside of San Pedro Columbia village, in the Toledo District of southern Belize.  This Maya city flourished in the late Classic period from around 700-900 AD.  The architecture at Lubaantun is very unique, built with hand cut blocks, laid without mortar into a step-pyramid form with rounded corners.

The spiritual ceremony was performed by a man who is a spiritual leader from the Belizean Maya community, accompanied by a Maya woman and man from Guatemala's Ak' Tenamit.  The central altar was composed of sugar to represent the sweetness of the world, on which copal and candles were burned.  The Maya altar and the Maya flag are composed of 4 equal sections, divided by an equal armed cross.  The four sections of the Maya flag are colored red, black, white, and yellow, which represent the four colors of corn and the four colors of people on Earth.  In the Maya vision of the world, all people are considered equal and people of all cultures, ethnic groups, and races are considered brothers and sisters.  Copious copal smoke and continuous Maya prayers filled the air between Lubaantun's ancient temples throughout the ceremony.

Thanks for visiting the new Remedia website!  We will be updating and expanding the site frequently in the coming months so please visit again soon!  Our vision for the Remedia website is for it to be an educational resource unto itself, providing compelling information and educational media.  Remedia's mission will be carried out both "in the field" at our program sites, as well as right here on our website! 

This blog will include updates and stories from our international programs, as well as organizational news, and relevant news from the scientific community.  We are also micro-blogging on Twitter!  Follow us - RemediaBELIZE if you use Twitter.  Or if not, you can read our tweets right here on our site on our Twitter page in the menu above.  Let us know what you think and check back soon!