douglas's blog

With such an abundance of food-producing plants here in the Toledo district, there is always a new food experience to be had. Gomier is an old friend from previous visits, and the proprietor and chef at his small restaurant by the sea (here's a nice piece about him from the Esperanza Project). He prepares vegetarian and fish-based dishes, and is often credited with providing some of the best meals available in Punta Gorda.

Jillian and I were lucky to get together with Gomier for a lesson in preparing cashews. It's a fairly simple process, but unique and fun in its own way. Best of all is at the end you have cashews to munch on!

These are the raw cashews in their shell. Raw cashews contain a toxin related to poison ivy which can be removed by fire...

With the help from a fire below, the cashews slowly catch on fire and blacken. Beware of the smoke ~ as I learned over the next few weeks, the toxin is burned off and present in the smoke. An unpleasant rash, very similar to poison ivy, results ~ for me the rashes lasted for about two weeks.

This is Gomier handling the burning cashews. Here, he is removing them from the fire, as they are now burning on their own.

Here in southern Belize, where I'm slowly working on dissertation research, it's hard to miss the influence of the Church on the local populations. There are a variety of churches trying to position themselves as the faith of choice here in Punta Gorda and in the villages of Toledo. Roman Catholics seem to be the most rooted here in the region, as evidenced by the many RC schools scattered throughout the district. However, Protestants continue to make inroads, and are quickly becoming a force in religious lives of many.

Doug here - happy New Year to all of our friends and supporters!

To kick off the new year, I thought I would share some quick updates with some things that are happening with Remedia. Jillian is currently down in Belize continuing to lay the groundwork for some of our great projects that we are getting started down there. She has been there since just before the holidays, and we are all looking forward to hearing about the new developments that she has going. 

I am currently in Tampa/St Petersburg, Florida busily finishing the details of my stateside pre-research PhD obligations at the University of South Florida (USF). I should be able to hit the ground running in Belize sometime in the early summer of this year. In the meantime, I have been working on some projects here in Tampa. Last September, I began a research project looking at the role that botanicas fill, primarily in terms of alternative health care, in Tampa. Working with a partner from USF, we have interviewed a handful of botanica owners, and have plans to begin interviewing their customers. We have a paper written on some of our preliminary findings that has been accepted at the annual meetings of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Merida, Mexico in March of this year. I will be there to present that work along with a paper on our work this past October with Maya healers during the Maya Day Celebrations at Tikal. I will share the abstracts for those papers in a future post.

Besides the botanica research, I am also working through the video we captured during the Maya Day Celebrations. Keep an eye out here and on our youtube page for more videos from that exciting work!

I hope everyone is doing well - here's to a safe, productive, and happy new year for 2010!

~doug