Stories from the Arroyos by Kathryn Carpenter

Author:Kathryn Carpenter [Carpenter, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781481719100
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Published: 2011-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

GRANDMOTHER’S GIFT

In school, we learned about a famous man called Louis Pasteur. The teacher explained to us about how he discovered the cause of sickness. She said he had a microscope and looked into it. He found little tiny things moving around that he could not see without the microscope. He said these were bacteria, living creatures that can cause sickness.

Now my grandmother is a little old-fashioned, and she says this is nonsense. She says sickness is caused by lack of fresh air—that illness is from drinking too much, hanging out with saloon girls, not eating properly, not getting enough sleep, and staying out in the rain when you should have sense enough to come inside. I think she gets her information from her own experiences with people.

Grandmother uses her own medicine to make people well, just as she did in Mexico. She uses plant parts, leeches, mustard poultices, and oils. She also uses teas and powders, willow bark, and many roots. People call her a curandera, which means “healer” in Spanish. She is called this because her homemade remedies help people feel better and overcome sickness. Grandmother says this is a gift passed on from generation to generation and not everyone can be a curandera.

Once I watched her help a man who had a serious injury to his arm that was all red, swollen, and painful. She carefully washed it with something from a bottle and dried the wounded arm. Then she put wiggling leeches on it and covered it with a towel. Sometime later she removed the leeches and told the man to come tomorrow. This went on for several days. I was very surprised to see the wound was almost healed. I asked her how this had worked.

“The leeches eat up the poison that is in the wound,” she told me.

I asked, “Why didn’t the man go to the doctor instead?”

She said, “He did not want the doctor to cut his arm off. The doctor would give him medicine, like morphine or aspirin, and maybe use a poultice of linseed oil to make it better. Most of the time the morphine makes a person sick, but it helps the pain. In the end, he very likely would have lost his arm.”

All this makes me more interested in the sickness and healing process. Whenever I can, I ask people from different countries what they do when someone is sick or injured. Wow, am I ever learning a lot! I get to see how the treatments are done. I see how some sicknesses can be cured and that other sicknesses cannot. I am learning about healing plants, oils, and teas. The leeches are not my favorite as far healing is concerned, but I see how they are still useful.

When my puppy met a porcupine and got what seemed like a thousand quills in his face and neck, I learned how to pull these out. I learned what poultice (a type of homemade medicine) to put on him to bring the swelling down.

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