Dear Editor,
I was very happy when it was announced that the University of Guyana would be the recipient of funding from the World Bank to study one of our local vegetables, Corilla (Momordica charantia) in order to pursue the fight against cancer. Growing up, I was lucky to have a parent who believed in giving us a variety of ‘bush teas’. Whenever one of us got an illness, depending on what type it was, some special type of bush tea was the first option, which would mostly be successful so it was not necessary to visit a doctor or hospital.
Many old folks would advise you about the different types of bush and vegetables to use if you have some illness and even now various types of bush and tree bark can be seen on sale that people believe are good for certain illnesses. Some people prepare them or would tell you
what kind of food to put them in. There are a lot of people who still believe in using them.
Many places in Zeelugt have daisies growing wild, and I recently observed someone collecting a tremendous number. When I told my wife that it is good for tea and had a wonderful aroma whilst it is being brewed, she looked at me as if I were mad. Like her many of the younger generation don’t know, or are either ashamed or foreign minded and won’t use these various bushes. However, if someone exports a bush, processes it (in some cases, weakens it) and imports it back here with some scientific name, they would rush to purchase it. Only recently a young lady was searching for a turmeric cream, and when we told her that it’s the ‘dye’ that people (mostly East Indians) use in their curry, and the natural dye is better than the processed one, she was amazed.
Guyana is blessed have a wide variety of plants and most of them are proven to be useful in many ways. However, they are considered as bush and a nuisance like the black-sage/sage bush, carrion crow bush, etc, although many old people would tell you that the dry leaves of the black sage bush are good for colds and the green leaves are known to be a powerful solution for washing meat and fish. The carrion crow bush is good for latta. some of these bushes are given scientific names and are ingredients in medicines, creams, etc, but because we don’t know them by their scientific names, we don’t know how important they are. Why this government is not getting our young emerging scientists to study them is a puzzle, because I am quite sure many of them grew up using some of these bushes or hearing about their importance.
Editor, we also have a lot of vegetables which are equally important. The grant for the study of the carilla is a testimony to that and I hope that a lot more of our agricultural produce can be the subject of scientific study.
Last Wednesday after eating lunch, all three of my children had a bout of vomiting and diarrhoea which lasted a day and a night. When I informed my relative, she asked what they had eaten and drunk. The children had eaten cabbage and she was convinced that that was the cause of the illness because it is the only vegetable locally that a lot of pesticide is used on in order to prevent caterpillars from eating it. One of the most popular pesticides here is malathion. Using it to keep away pests from plants is not dangerous provided you wait fourteen days before it is made available for consumption, but some farmers do not do that. The Ministry of Agriculture needs to monitor the farmers more closely. Some of them are using all kinds of chemicals to get faster crops which will yield more money. They are then picked and rushed to the market to sell, and there is no mechanism to monitor and test these vegetables before they are sold.
Yours faithfully,
Sahadeo Bates
