To Those GOOD FOLKS With Whom I Like To Exchange Stories, share ideas, mutually engage in real work, visit and generally keep up to date:
Forget the politics and the economics for a moment. Sometimes a story is "just a story." Because sometimes a coincidence is too good to pass up.
~ ~ ~
I just found out this summer that my great, great grandmother (in Spanish: my tata abuela) was an herbalist, a medicine woman, or in the words of my grandmother: "She knew woods-medicine." According to my Uncle C, my mother's brother, she'd follow behind folks weeding in the fields gathering "the roots or some part of them plants the rest of us called weeds." Then, "She'd boil 'em and boil 'em and boil 'em until she made a... little vile of something" like what some of my friends today call "tinctures." My Uncle C told me all about it: "Then, she'd take a little bit of it everyday. She said it taste good. It kept her healthy."
So, I asked my Uncle C whether he thought it tasted good: "Tasted good, huh? You ever get sick? She give you some? It tasted good?"
"Oh yeah," he said, "It tasted real-good. Like," he paused for effect, "Like trying to swallow a bag of nails."
In her role as a medicine woman, Mary Carroll, Mary Emeline Elizabeth Carroll, my great-great-grandmother was also a midwife. The two went hand-in-hand. And the healing touch passed down through the generations. My great-grandmother knew the plants too, my grandmother told me. But when Grandma Mary (my great-great) died, "Big Granny" (my great-grandmother) stopped collecting plants. So my grandmother didn't learn the plants. But the healing-touch wastn't to be lost. My mother's a nurse. And three of my cousins have been involved with healing others in one way or another.
~ ~ ~
Three weeks ago, before our semester break when I made a dash to Seattle to visit my sister Kelley-- Three weeks ago, as a BorderLinks group, we visited Dona Gloria, an Indian medicine woman (una curandera) who lives on the west side of Nogales in a neighborhood called Los Encinos. She's 79. We ate chicken soup, she told us stories and sang us songs. She said, "If I were to tell you everything my father taught me, we would be sitting here many days." Such are the words of a storyteller. Like obediant grand children, we sat around her while she told stories.
And at some point, I asked her about my hypoglycemia. First, she said, you must not eat those things that "make you mad" because you have "emotional blood sugar. It is mental, crazy." And then, she told me, "Every morning, you must take a glass of water and lift it towards God and say, 'Dios (God) help me today. Fill this water with your spritual medicine. Give me the strength I need and the steadiness to make it through the day.' And then, drink it all and give thanks to the Lord." Lastly, she suggested that when I feel my blood sugar crash, I should eat something good for me and do something else for a while like write or sing a song or draw a picture.
And her plants! When she moved to the city in 2002, she brought her plants with her from the country-side. In pots, growing in her patio, peach, orange, lime, lemon, and other fruit trees. Several plants for diarhea, several for stomach pains, several for nausia, several for head ache, several for ant bites, bee stings, muscle pain, bone strains, menstral cramps, when you have a cough in January, when you've got a runny nose in spring time, for a clear mind, for internal parasites. They looked like weeds. She knew better. Her eyes and words flowed with wisdom.
We were there for two hours. Only two hours. Maybe it was actually five minutes. But the short hand did move two places.
~ ~ ~
Like I said, I just found out in August that my great-great-grandmother knew "woods-medicine." Too bad, I thought, that my great-grandmother didn't pass this knowledge down to my grandmother and she to my mother.... How I would have liked to walk the forest with a person of such wisdom. How I would have liked to ask my mother or grandmother for cures. How I would have liked to be able to pick weeds, make teas, and take them to family and friends as medicine because I grew up in a house with such wisdom. But, it wasn't passed down.
For this reason, just for one more taste of my family's history, I wanted to visit Dona Gloria again.
~ ~ ~
Well, I didn't know Dona Gloria's address. All I knew was the name of her neighborhood, its general location in Nogales, a city of 450,000, the correct bus route, the main road into the neighborhood, the look of the hill on her street, and the look of her patio from inside her fence. I talked to Elias, my spanish tutor about visiting her, and he told me it'd be no problem. "Just go to her neighborhood and ask the people. Since she's a curandera, everyone will know where she lives."
So the other day, I took a walk. I took a bus to Los Encinos, and then I took another walk into the neighborhood.
I walked asking the people as I went. Contrary to the advice of Elias, no one seemed to know Dona Gloria, "la curandera que vive en una loma en esta colonia" (the medicine woman who lives on a hill in this neighborhood). Finally, two different women pointed me to a house. "She lives there," one, and then the other, told me. But I'd visited her with Theresa and the other BorderLinks students before, three weeks ago. The house they pointed to was not the same house I'd visited.
So, after the first referral, I explored the neighborhood again. Up streets, past growling dogs, always with my questions at the ready: "Do you know Dona Gloria?" But I didn't find her house, and the people didn't know where she lived or, even, who she was. "Good afternoon," I told the folks on the street. Then I returned by the same way: "Good afternoon." And again: "Good afternoon again."
Who is this gringo? I've seen that gringo three times already.
"Do you have the address?" they asked. "No, but she lives on a hill," I replied. "Si (yes) but there are many hills..." "I know. Well, Thanks. Thank you. I'm going to look some more. Thank you again. Adios."
So I returned to the main street once again. Who are the gossips? I began to wonder. Who in a Mexican neighborhood, colonia would know everyone else? The shopkeepers? The elderly? I passed a beauty shop. I stopped.
"Excuse me. Do you know Dona Gloria? She is a curandera." The lady inside told me she did. She told me, "She lives right there," pointing.
It was the same house again, not the one I'd visited three weeks ago but the one with a green gate. Well who knows, I thought.
Perhaps, I thought, she received us in a friend's house because it had a bigger kitchen or perhaps this house in front of me was her child's house. Regardless, if it was the house of another Dona Gloria, perhaps all the Dona Glorias in the nieghborhood knew each other.
So I opened the gate and knocked on the front door.
A woman, say, 40-years-old, opened the door.
"Ah, oh. Estoy, I am looking for Dona Gloria. Does she live here?" I asked.
"Dona Gloria?" No. She doesn't live here." And she said something else, but with my limited spanish I missed most of it and forgot the rest. "Pero mi mama, But my mother Dona - - - - - lives here." (I didn't catch the name.)
The lady left calling her mother. Was it her, Dona Gloria afterall? I saw an elderly figure approach the door from the shadows. Dona Gloria?
Nope.
This elderly woman told me her name was Elora. She knew a Dona Gloria, but not the same one I visited. Her Dona Gloria lived across the street, was sick, and "is about 80-years-old." But she's not a curandera.
Dona Yoya, as Elora is called, asked me what I was doing? Why was I trying to visit Dona Gloria? Where was I staying in Nogales?
"Just to talk," I responded. "She tells stories very well, and I visited her three weeks ago with group. I'm living with a family in Colonia Rosario, but every day I go to the Casa de la Misericordia (House of Mercy, the BorderLinks' compound) for classes."
"BorderLinks?" she asked. "Yes. I'm studying with BorderLinks," I said.
"Oh really?" she said. "I'll be right back," she prefaced. She came back with a book of photos. "Two years ago, I had 'BorderLinks children' in my house for five weeks. Four of them.... They were wonderful." She began to show me the pictures. "Chelsea from Washington, " she pointed, "And David from North Carolina.... And Colin--"
"David?!" I jumped. I knew that kid. "Si," she continued--
"David is from my college!" I exclaimed. No way. I shook my head. I bit my lower lip. No way. 100,000 houses in Nogales...
"Si, David, David Andrews from North Carolina. "He was so nice. When he came, he couldn't speak any spanish. But he learned very fast. They," pointing to a group photo of BorderLinks students, "made me a pinata for my birthday." She showed me the birthday cards they'd made her. I saw David Andrew's signature. "They were terrific," she told me. "He's from your college? Really?"
"Si," I responded.
~ ~ ~
David Andrews was my admissions tour guide the first time I visited Warren Wilson. I sat in on his eight-person theology class in April of my junior year of high school. He's two years older than I. He attended BorderLinks two years ago. And, out of the hundred-thousand houses in Nogales, he lived in the house of Dona Yoya, which I happened to find via a bad referral from a lady in a neighborhood beautyshop in a nieghborhood on the far side of Nogales from my host family and from the Casa de la Misericordia.
David Andrews, Matt Blue, and I are the only students I know who have been to BorderLinks. There have been others, but we are the only ones I know of. I found David Andrew's host family, and Elias, my spanish tutor was Matt Blue's tutor.
How do you say, "It's a small world," without sounding like a Disney promotion?
~ ~ ~
Well, I did eventually find Dona Gloria. I found her today. And we talked, and she told me stories, and I drank fresh-made tea and ate fresh-made soup from her patio plants. She gave me more suggestions for my hypoglycemia: cactus broth. She told more stories, sung another song, showed me pictures of her family, mentioned her indian heritage, commented on her home before Nogales: a farm in the country; and she told me that whenever I want to come again, "Mi casa es tu casa (my house is your house)."
~ ~ ~
Some things are really nice in this world, and there's no politicin' or economizin' that.
Nathan
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