Fijian Medicine I

Jasper seems to have picked up a cold that started showing symptoms this morning. I’m guessing he got it at Joeli’s auntie’s funeral that Eseta took him to on Tuesday. When I picked him up from her house, she said he had a great time, and that all the people were picking him up and kissing him and passing him around.

When I picked him up today, Eseta said, “My mom say he has the mucous (runny nose) because he hot inside.” Basically, having a runny nose is a symptom of being “hot” in the chest/back. She told me that she sponged him down with a cool cloth to bring out the “hot” and that tomorrow, she would give him some Fijian medicine. So of course I asked what that entailed. She told me that they take the drove root and grate it and squeeze the juice out of it, add some water, and feed it to the child. She likened it to ginger root, and said that it is often used for children, also in combination with kavika bark (scrape it out and squeeze it) and wi (“like a mango, but green, and the seed is not round”). I’m supposed to come over tomorrow morning and see how it’s done (they are harvesting the drove this afternoon down the road).

So like any paranoid/responsible parent, I went to John and Barbara’s house because I knew they had a book on Fijian medicine. I looked up drove and found the Latin name, read the short description in the book on its uses, then googled the Latin name to find out as much as I could. Turns out, the common names are “Shampoo Ginger” and Awapuhi, the same stuff they put in shampoo. The root is in the ginger family, and is widely used in the pacific as a remedy for coughs and thrush, and the flowers are crushed and used in hair products. There was even a scientific paper on its anti-inflammatory properties. So there you go: well known, widely used, perfectly safe. I should have known they weren’t going to give him something weird and dangerous, but I just had to check.

The next day:
Sure enough, the root looks just like ginger, and Eseta makes it just how she says, mixing the grated root with a little bit of water and squeezing it through a cloth. She asks me if I want to try some. I feel like I might be getting the cold too, so I say yes. Oh man is it bitter. Not nearly as tasty as ginger. I say “good luck getting Jasper to drink that.” She just smiles and gives him some in a spoon, and he drinks it up and then makes a face. But all of the kids there surround him and start cheering, and he immediately smiles and is fine. Ah the influence and distraction of seven other kids. No wonder Eseta says he has never had an accident there. He just does what all of the other kids do.

She also told me that I need to make sure he doesn’t go outside during a sudden downpour (“You know, when it rains, then it stops. In the afternoon.”), because that will make kids sick. I ask her if it’s only during the afternoon rain, and she repeats, “When it starts and then stops.” So Normal rain is ok I guess, just not the sudden ones. Then she adds, “If he get wet during this rain, you have to shower him and wash it off, then he be ok.” Go figure.