Dawn Skepmire believes that she is now in a place of comfort that she has been anticipating for much of her life. Two decades of residing in the United States and of studying and working there positioned her to return to Guyana in 2017 and to create an entrepreneurial pursuit that is as much a labour of love as it is a business venture.
Dawndelion Holistic Herbal Store has been trading at 12 Sussex Street, Charlestown since 2017 and the services that it offers is consistent with Dawn’s professional training in the United States. Apart from her qualifications as a Registered Nurse, Dawn is a graduate of the Institute of Chinese Herbology in Concorde, California. There she spent two years studying herbal medicine, learning how to diagnose and treat ailments, employing what we in Guyana commonly call ‘bush’ remedies.
She credits her contemporary expertise in herbal medicine to those ‘early years,’ of experiencing home remedies concocted from grasses, leaves and roots here in Guyana. On the job as a nurse in the United States she became renowned among her colleagues for her herbal recommendations whenever some minor ailment or physical discomfort struck amongst them. It was here, it seems, that she became fixated with the idea of retiring to Guyana and offering her healing services utilising the protocols she had learnt from her conventional nursing training combined with her by now enhanced awareness of the growing global importance associated with herbal remedies.
Dawn believes that the treatment of ailments may well be moving ‘full circle,’ here in Guyana, with the remedial focus shifting back to the “old ways” of herbs and grasses. She contends that setting aside the outcomes of scientific research that have justified the use of herbs and grasses in the treatment of a range of maladies, global suspicion arising out of what is now a multi-billion dollar fake-drugs industry and its insidious proliferation into poor countries, may also have resulted in a more aggressive embracing of what Guyanese loosely call ‘bush’ medicines.
Her own experience as the proprietor of Dawndelion is that there continues to be an encouraging growth in the local herbal medicines market. “People are coming to me from as far away as Lethem, Bartica, Essequibo and Berbice. They are looking for remedies that they have not found in conventional medicine. They are reading more about the side effects of drugs. These days there is more information out there on herbal remedies.”
Seemingly possessed of an abiding faith in herbal medicines, Dawn believes that up to 90% of our local plants could contain varying levels of healing agents. Likely proof of this, she says, is to be found in the high level of plant ingredients in many of our imported drugs. She points out, too, that the rise in popularity of herbal medicine in Guyana has meant that medicinal plants which could have been gathered with relative ease some years ago have now become difficult to come by. While most of her herbs are imported from the United States Dawn says that her recent acquisition of a plot of land at Kuru Kuru has added impetus to her plan to cultivate medicinal plants “on a large scale” locally. Meanwhile, she has already begun to cultivate, albeit on a modest scale, plants such as morenga, mother-in-law tongue and thick-leaf calaloo, which she says are insulin-rich and important to her herbal medicine pursuits.
Dawn credits among her more important accomplishments the fact that she has been able to persuade many ordinary Guyanese with conventional illnesses to pay a greater measure of attention to the healing power of herbal medicine. Accordingly, she has offered free consultation and in the fashion of the old-style apothecary, markets her remedies in modest, affordable quantities. Her clinics, she says, regularly attract persons stricken with diabetes and hypertension, among other common ailments. In passing she quickly mentions that pumpkin seeds are good for the gut and provides nourishment for the pancreas.
A convert of the axiom that what we eat is what we are, Dawn says that part of her longer-term plan is to cultivate organic vegetables on a fairly large scale. “Frankly, I am quite concerned with the excess intake for vegetables that are fertilizer-dependent. Everybody should try, as far as possible, to try to put down something in a little garden.” Herbal cures aside, Dawn is an advocate of regular exercise and has established a gym at 12 Sussex Street in Charlestown.
