Botanicas in Tampa and Other Updates

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