Healer in a strange land

Vegetarian Times, Nov, 1998 by Suzanne Gerber

Sometimes you can be on a collision course with destiny and not even realize it. Such was-the case with Rosita Arvigo and the Belizean rain forest. The 57-year-old Chicago native: had known that plants would be a significant part of her life ever since she'd helped her grandfather plant one of FDR's victory gardens when she was 4. Her story is a variation on a classic formula: Girl meets rain forest, girl loses rain forest, girl saves rain forest. But there's a twist: It took her, an American outsider, to step in and bridge the gap between Belize's 5,000-year-old history of using the rain forest for healing and its future as an emerging nation.

When Rosita first arrived in the tiny Central American democracy, its legacy of Maya plant medicine was going the way of its majestic rain forest: into extinction. She and her husband, Greg Shropshire, had come to establish their own healing practice (as naprapaths and she also as an herbalist) in a bucolic setting. But a chance meeting in 1985 with a Maya shaman, Don Elijio Panti, changed all that forever.

Don Elijio was the last vestige of the ancient Maya healing tradition. When Arvigo met him, he was already over 90 and had never had an apprentice--the classic way wisdom is passed from one generation to the next. It looked like his intimate familiarity with more than 500 plants and their healing properties would die with him. Arvigo spent a year trying to convince him to take her on as his apprentice. But Don Elijio was insistent that the knowledge stay among his-people. It was only when she promised to stay in Belize permanently and continue his work that he consented.

"The next 10 years, studying with Don Elijio, were like a magic pocket in my life," says Arvigo. She recalls long days spent in the rain forest, learning about the plants and the Maya's belief in the spiritual aspect of healing. ("The plants are secondary in healing," she says. "The spirits do the real work.") Together they would treat his enormous client roster, which often involved patients living with Don Elijio throughout their treatment--sometimes for months. Arvigo knew she was the beneficiary of a rare gift and wrote about her extraordinary apprenticeship in a book called Sastun (HarperCollins, 1994).

One day in 1987, Arvigo read about Michael Balick and his work with the NCI searching for potential cancer and AIDS cures in the rain forest. "I'd written to dozens of scientists before about Don Elijio," says Arvigo, "and they all said the same thing: `Great project, but we have no time or money.' Michael was different. He wrote back immediately and said to call him, collect. Easy for him to say! I had to walk 10 miles to a phone!"

When Arvigo introduced him to Don Elijio, Balick recognized the rare opportunity to work with a true shaman. Using NCI funding, the threesome spent a good part of the next nine years collecting plant samples for research, following Don Elijio's leads. When the old man watched Balick expertly collect and catalog some 3,000 plants, he told Arvigo, "I guess those doctors aren't so dumb after all." To date, one-third of those samples have been analyzed in American labs, and 10 show promise for fighting a variety of diseases.

Another project was conceived one sunny day in 1991, as Don Elijio was telling Arvigo how the forest used to be 10 minutes from his hut and now, thanks to unbridled demolition, it was a two-hour hike. A light bulb went off in her head: Salvage plants targeted for destruction, transplant them somewhere safe, harvest them and make medicinal tinctures (which last seven times longer than dried herbs in the thick Belizean humidity). Thus was born the company Rainforest Remedies, which produces a collection of nine different formulas based on Don Elijio's knowledge and Arvigo's extensive research. They offer relief for ailments as divergent as PMS, back pain, stomachache, colds and flu. Half of the proceeds go to the Belize Traditional Healers Foundation, which Arvigo established to fund local healers and to funnel a share of the profits to them, should a major cure stemming from their knowledge be found.

Arvigo and her husband are now firmly committed to the perpetuation of Maya healing techniques. In addition to forging the NCI collaboration, growing the remedies business and serving on the board of the foundation, they established a medicine trail on the property of their farm (named Ix Chel, after the Maya goddess of medicine), where visitors can see many of the native healing trees, plants and vines up close. Arvigo conducts herbal seminars (in Belize and the United States) and shares Don Elijio's teachings with local healers. Despite tremendous obstacles, she created a 6,000-acre plant sanctuary, called Terra Nova, where plants headed for destruction are relocated and husbanded for medicinal use. Plus she oversees the growing and harvesting of botanicals for an American company called Arum, which maintains strict quality standards for the organic plants added to its hair and skin products.