One thing I love about my community is the widespread knowledge of “bush remedies” and where they can be found in the area. Much of my community utilizes bush remedies on a regular basis for themselves and for their children since it’s cheap, easy to find and culturally engrained. Usually these plant remedies can be made into two forms, boiled into a tea or ground to a poultice for external use. My adopted culture is also very suspicious of people like politicians, bankers or doctors, so bush medicine can be a good way to avoid the Jamaican public healthcare system. Here are some "bushes" and their uses.
Bizzy Tea is one of the more commonly used remedies. If you have young children or animals, you’re going to want bizzy around. My dog, Poppy has walked into the house two of three times foaming at the mouth which stopped abruptly once we gave her bizzy tea.
I remember distinctly the first time I interacted with bizzy. Walking to Salem School very early in service I passed by an enthusiastic old farmer who excitedly procured from a black scandal bag a grubby handful of the strange fruit. He explained how to dry it, grate it and boil it into a tea to cure “poison”. I remember taking a few, wiping the dirt from them and taking a picture, which I think is in this blog if you look far back enough. I recently found out that Bizzy is a plant commonly used in Africa also known as Kola Nut. I bet you know it.
Rural Jamaican language doesn’t utilize traditional American descriptors, so descriptions of illness often sounds like this: “Mi get paison” (I got poison) “Mi haa cold inna mi troat” (I have a cold in my throat) or “Mi foot sick”. It also bears mentioning that the “foot” can be the descriptor for anything from the hip to the toe, the “hand” from shoulder to finger, so that leaves a lot of room for error when deducing the problem. Phlegm is also referred to as “the cold”.
So in this vague manner I slowly became aware of the common practice of goat owners poisoning dogs who are constantly harassing (read: eating) their livestock. I’ve known a few dogs who were reportedly poisoned and killed for the very same offence.
In my mind full of buttercups and daisies, I assumed that the goats’ fur was powdered with something toxic to ingest, obviously and blissfully not thinking it through. I only learned that the practice is to set poisoned bait after my dog threw up by the glow of our candlelit dinner (the power was out). It was impressive and terrifying how quickly things went downhill after that. Her pupils dilated, her legs unsteady, stomach clenched and bladder…loose. After a few minutes of dimly lit confusion we realized that bizzy was our only hope.
It was a difficult night as we watched something we loved so much suffer, not knowing how bad it really was or if she’d make it in the end. She ran away at one point and came back an hour 1/2 later with dirt on her nose prompting Evrick to remember that an addition to the bizzy remedy for dogs was soil. I think it has something to do with soaking up what’s inside (I’d be interested to know the science if anyone out there does). We force fed her more bizzy and she struggled away and back into the bush where we could hear her growling and whimpering but it was hard to tell if the noise was from the pain or something else. I didn’t think we could do anything more at this point and the prospect of searching for my dying pet in the bush was terrifying to me, so I chose to go to my bed, but I didn’t sleep.
Around 4am I heard a loud and deliberate whine outside the veranda and Poppy bounced into the house looking about 50% better than we’d last seen her. She still avoided the bizzy and I did not relax enough to sleep until I heard her lapping from her bowl, 5am. It’s now 4pm and she’s almost 100%. We now realize that the growling and crying was the noise she makes when she digs holes, which she was doing last night to eat dirt.
I won’t speak about the person who laid the poison or why it was done. I am too exhausted and thankful to explore the limits of the human soul but would rather chalk it up to Lady Misfortune. But I was glad to learn today that setting poison for dogs is not a cultural quirk that is widely accepted, that even though people keep a comfortable distance from their dogs here, it doesn’t mean they don’t care for them or love them. I’ve heard stories similar to mine since I began relaying my incident and I’ve also heard worse. One woman asked how I treated the poison and when I said I used bizzy she gave me an approving nod and said, “It’s a lucky thing you had some in your house!”
Indeed my friend, I’ll be bringing a suitcase full to foreign!
Bizzy Tea is one of the more commonly used remedies. If you have young children or animals, you’re going to want bizzy around. My dog, Poppy has walked into the house two of three times foaming at the mouth which stopped abruptly once we gave her bizzy tea.
I remember distinctly the first time I interacted with bizzy. Walking to Salem School very early in service I passed by an enthusiastic old farmer who excitedly procured from a black scandal bag a grubby handful of the strange fruit. He explained how to dry it, grate it and boil it into a tea to cure “poison”. I remember taking a few, wiping the dirt from them and taking a picture, which I think is in this blog if you look far back enough. I recently found out that Bizzy is a plant commonly used in Africa also known as Kola Nut. I bet you know it.
Rural Jamaican language doesn’t utilize traditional American descriptors, so descriptions of illness often sounds like this: “Mi get paison” (I got poison) “Mi haa cold inna mi troat” (I have a cold in my throat) or “Mi foot sick”. It also bears mentioning that the “foot” can be the descriptor for anything from the hip to the toe, the “hand” from shoulder to finger, so that leaves a lot of room for error when deducing the problem. Phlegm is also referred to as “the cold”.
So in this vague manner I slowly became aware of the common practice of goat owners poisoning dogs who are constantly harassing (read: eating) their livestock. I’ve known a few dogs who were reportedly poisoned and killed for the very same offence.
In my mind full of buttercups and daisies, I assumed that the goats’ fur was powdered with something toxic to ingest, obviously and blissfully not thinking it through. I only learned that the practice is to set poisoned bait after my dog threw up by the glow of our candlelit dinner (the power was out). It was impressive and terrifying how quickly things went downhill after that. Her pupils dilated, her legs unsteady, stomach clenched and bladder…loose. After a few minutes of dimly lit confusion we realized that bizzy was our only hope.
It was a difficult night as we watched something we loved so much suffer, not knowing how bad it really was or if she’d make it in the end. She ran away at one point and came back an hour 1/2 later with dirt on her nose prompting Evrick to remember that an addition to the bizzy remedy for dogs was soil. I think it has something to do with soaking up what’s inside (I’d be interested to know the science if anyone out there does). We force fed her more bizzy and she struggled away and back into the bush where we could hear her growling and whimpering but it was hard to tell if the noise was from the pain or something else. I didn’t think we could do anything more at this point and the prospect of searching for my dying pet in the bush was terrifying to me, so I chose to go to my bed, but I didn’t sleep.
Around 4am I heard a loud and deliberate whine outside the veranda and Poppy bounced into the house looking about 50% better than we’d last seen her. She still avoided the bizzy and I did not relax enough to sleep until I heard her lapping from her bowl, 5am. It’s now 4pm and she’s almost 100%. We now realize that the growling and crying was the noise she makes when she digs holes, which she was doing last night to eat dirt.
I won’t speak about the person who laid the poison or why it was done. I am too exhausted and thankful to explore the limits of the human soul but would rather chalk it up to Lady Misfortune. But I was glad to learn today that setting poison for dogs is not a cultural quirk that is widely accepted, that even though people keep a comfortable distance from their dogs here, it doesn’t mean they don’t care for them or love them. I’ve heard stories similar to mine since I began relaying my incident and I’ve also heard worse. One woman asked how I treated the poison and when I said I used bizzy she gave me an approving nod and said, “It’s a lucky thing you had some in your house!”
Indeed my friend, I’ll be bringing a suitcase full to foreign!
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