NATURAL REMEDIES
Caribbean herbalist keeps old traditions alive
A Curacao school teacher has become the go-to authority on the healing power of native plants and traditional beliefs.
Dinah Veeris recalls laughing as a girl when her mother and aunt tried to cure her of minor ailments using herbs and traditional medicines.
''My mother used to talk to the plants and I thought she was crazy,'' said Veeris, whose smooth skin and sprightly gait belie her 69 years. ``I told her that if I was sick I should go to a doctor.''
Thirty years later after a bout of health problems, Veeris reversed course and became a student of traditional herbal remedies and the nature-based spiritualism embraced by the Caribbean's native Indians and the African slaves brought to the islands during colonial times.
Now she is an authority on the healing power of native plants and traditional beliefs, sought out for consultations by the sick and troubled, and cited by others in the fast-growing arena of natural remedies.
A researcher from New Mexico State University has featured her work in a documentary film, and Veeris has written two books on the subject.
''I'm glad to see people coming back to nature, especially children, but there needs to be more of it,'' she said. ``There are so many problems in our world now and we go on building big houses and abusing nature. The old people always told me that if you abuse nature, it will hit back at you.''
A school teacher on her native Curacao for many years, Veeris was educated in the strict schools on the island that prohibited children from speaking the island's Papiamentu tongue, forcing them to learn Dutch and to adopt European thinking and culture.
In the 1980s, she had surgery and soon found herself feeling unbalanced and uncomfortable. Herbal teas from her mother helped her recover, and her interest in natural remedies grew.
''I spent five years going into the mountains talking to old people about the remedies and native plants,'' she said. ``For generations this knowledge had been hidden because it was banned by the Catholic church. But the old people still knew these ways.''
The old ways were kept alive by the descendants of Curacao's African slaves, imported to the island to work on plantations in the 1600s and 1700s. They brought their knowledge of herbal remedies with them, but had to adapt to new plants they hadn't seen before.
Some lessons may have been learned from the native Caiquetio Indians, who ultimately disappeared, dying of diseases brought by the European colonists.
Eventually Veeris quit her teaching job, bought an old farm and began cultivating a garden of native plants.
''People thought I was crazy,'' she said, laughing, ``but I knew it was the right thing to do.''
Veeris points out a wide variety of plants, noting their uses as herbal remedies and their places in traditional folklore.
The seeds of the tromustok tree are used as a laxative, while the poisonous matapiska plant, also called ''Kill the fish plant'' because fishermen throw it into water to stun fish, makes a cure for lice when mixed with alcohol, she said.
The calabash tree, which produces large globular fruit the size of a soccer ball, is used for asthma and coughs and for making shampoo.
A concoction made from a cactus is good for backaches, she said, as well as for dandruff shampoo.
Veeris' garden, called ''Den Paradera,'' or ''where people feel at home,'' is a combination herbal remedy factory, garden and small tourist attraction.
Visitors come for twice-daily tours, some conducted by Veeris' son, who quit his job as a banker in Holland a few years ago and returned to Curacao to join his mother in her enterprise.
The garden is well tended and surprisingly lush on arid Curacao, an island of about 140,000 people.
''I talk to the plants, just like my mother did,'' she said. ``And I sit in the shade of the trees and listen, picking up their energy. I go there when I want answers to things that are troubling me.''
By MIKE WILLIAMS
Cox News Service
