Story by Renae Mijares Encinas, Summer 2020
Phyllanthus niruri is a tropical plant that grows in certain coastal areas. An abundance of phyllanthus niruri grows on the land my family lives on in the Philippines which is directly off the seacoast. My family calls it taltalikod in Ilokano (the regional language used by my maternal family in Ilocos Sur), which translates into “back-to-back” after the ways its leaves literally grow back-to-back. While certain plants like taltalikod are often cast aside simply as “weeds,” many people, such as my family, regard these plants as our greatest medicines. During a month-long stay with my family in 2018, I’d become prey to something that left me with what looked like bug bites and bruises all over my body. No matter what precautions I took, including copious amounts of bug repellant, the marks continued to expand over my body. “They like your blood--American blood is sweeter” my family told me as a way to explain why only I was afflicted. After two weeks, my grandma told me that a doctor was coming to check out my marks. Coming from the United States, I’d expected a conventional Western doctor with pills and all, so I was surprised when she arrived and I realized she was a shaman and herbal healer like the ones my parents’ generation told me stories of. After performing a ritual that involved grains of rice and water, she divined the cause of my pains: I had disrespected the dwende (tiny gnome-like creatures that humans cannot see) that live on and protect the tree that I had poured water all over (to cool off a puppy from the heat). While the majority of Filipinos, including my family, are Catholic as a result of Spanish colonialism, our indigenous spiritualities and animism still prevail. In Filipino superstition, creatures and spirits live all around us, and we must pay our respects to them. It is common to say “excuse me” or to ask for permission before stepping onto land and to always be respectful to all living beings in nature. After being reminded of this, the doctor and my aunt left to gather medicine. They returned with handfuls of taltalikod. I was told “stop using your ointment--this is your medicine now.” When I asked my grandma why they chose this specific plant, she expressed that the best medicine is what’s closest and all around us. I was given the taltalikod to boil with water in a cauldron and was instructed to pour it all over my body daily until it ran out. After three days of bathing in the taltalikod herbal tea as prescribed, I stopped getting more welts and bruises for the remainder of my stay and my marks started healing. When my four-year old cousin visited a couple months ago, a similar thing happened to him, and he was also given taltalikod baths to heal him. Despite whatever doubts people have about shamanism, the effectiveness of herbal remedies, or its “scientific backing,” generations of my family have relied on these methods—to this day.