Curves and countercurves. A dam, a funnel, a wall. A route that at some point becomes straight and infinite towards the south. In Villa Ciudad America, 67 km from the capital of Cordoba, we find Doña Pabla, a yuyera doctor who generously shares her word with us. We talked regarding healing, its relationship with plants and the consequences of clearing on medicine.
By Anabella Antonelli and Juan Pablo Pantano for The Ink
“Healing is typical of one, it is a devotion that one has and it comes out”, Pabla Olsina tells us when we turn on the recorder. The house is surrounded by weeds and stones. A fireplace heats the cold that penetrates through its openings. The painting denotes the passage of time. She has been living there for 36 years. The room is decorated with drawn portraits and black and white photos. The light is dim. Her kitchen lights a slow fire. Time runs differently. Colors have another meaning. The word home too: it is a place to heal.
In her patio-nursery there is a small wooden table where Pabla receives whoever wants to come. A green long-tailed hummingbird comes up once more and once more. She follows him with her eyes and begins to speak: “Many years ago I came here because my mother got sick. She lived there in José de La Quintana, she got sick and I asked for this little house here. These lands remained when they expropriated the fields to make the wall and the tunnels. They belong to the state.”
Pabla is just over seventy years old and is just under a meter and a half tall; she lives with her dog in a nursery house; She is a yuyera doctor, she believes that medicine is in the land we inhabit. “I started as an old woman, yes, as an old woman. I had an internal knowledge, because what I know is very difficult to teach, it is something of my own, very difficult to know”.
They come to her patio from all over, “they have even come from Tierra del Fuego, it’s nice because you feel accompanied and feel that you are useful for something”. He receives people, sits them down, listens to them and, through tape, connects with their bodies. “They feel bad and come to healing. So I have a tape and with the tape I measure and I know what it has, with that is what is prescribed -she explains patiently-. Today I can give you medicine, but if I treat you without believing what I am doing to you, you will not heal. If you don’t believe in what I do when I do the medicine, you can’t be cured either because you don’t let it in”.
What makes a person like Pabla dedicate her time, life and effort to heal other people? Love, empathy, rebellion seeps into his words. “You see so many people sometimes who have a disease. Say that you have a dispensary and people come to you with so many illnesses, ailments, blows, with so many things. And that you are there and they say ‘no, I can’t cure you’, that’s sad. So one says ‘no, it can’t be’, because we all feel the same, one in one way, another in another, but we all suffer from illnesses, there are thousands of different consequences, but all of that is suffered”, he refers .
earth medicine
We talk regarding connections; with people, with the environment and, of course, with plants, which are the means that Pabla chooses to heal. “I know the essence of each plant, I know which one needs the most and which one needs the least, which one is the most charitable with one.” In this connection, rational logics, society-nature, mind-body dualities are disarmed. “Nature has very much knowledge. Very many things to know regarding the production of mysteries. Why it is there and what it is for, how that plant is composed. Learning to look, to browse and not once as if we had a little notebook, is not easy”he points out.
For parasites, nettle, “the passionflower for everything, is something special”. Thyme, peperina, pennyroyal. Knowledge of the mountains that open paths to other ways of learning and healing. “The contrayerba it is used for many things. It is very scarce here. It is even used for snake bites, it is taken once morest poison, it is purgative, so it is used to remove the poison. And so for several other things too: for intoxication, to deflate the bronchial tubes, for colds. Because it is a hot plant, it has a lot of calories, everything that has a lot of calories is good for this season and everything that is cold is good for heat.”
Faced with the evils of this world, of forms of consumption, of ignorance regarding what is eaten, drunk, and breathed, Pabla chooses plants for daily care, such as yellow sticks or horsetail: “The yellow stick is to level the pressure. As it is so mild, you can drink it in mate, in tea, in aguapasto, you can let it boil and then you drink it, it does nothing to you, it cures whatever is bad in your body, any followingmath you have, but it does not does bad”. The same happens with horsetail that “serves to unclog, because it is diuretic, it purges the intestine, the kidneys. That’s why it’s nice to always take those weeds, even if they don’t feel anything.
His knowledge -away from all Western, codified and abstract ways of understanding bodies- aims to heal from the comprehensive understanding of what happens to us. The experience and the relationship with the environment that surrounds us are pillars of knowing regarding it. Underground elements that are revealed as a book.
For Doña Pabla, the link between the body and the plants is natural, “it is the same process as our life, the same, only that they are handled with their liquid, which is sage, and we handle ourselves with blood. The hot part of our body is the blood, and for them the sage. You take out the sage and it dies, you take out our blood and we die, it’s all a story”.
Paul and Daniela
While we talk, Daniela prepares mates and listens to her attentively, she hardly speaks. “I teach the knowledge of yerba, but not curing, because I can’t, I don’t get there, but of yerba and the recognition of the plant yes. People from the University have come before. They came twice a week with the students, we went out to explore the mountains and the grasses. Later I began to go with them to get to know the faculty, but they raised the study more here in the house”, says Pabla.
She looks at Dani and tells us that she is also a student, that she started going to her house when she was still studying and they practiced together. “As a teacher, Pabla is very unique, her teaching is love and dedication to medicine. She is demanding but always with love. She is also very funny, she makes me laugh a lot, I have a great time with her, ”says Dani, who decided to live in the Calamuchita Valley to share a few years with her. “It is learning to see life from another point of view, in this case your point of view. It is taking care of oral knowledge and traditions that have been in these territories for years. Value and know that other forms of life are possible”he adds.
Once a week he visits her, they drink mates, gather weeds, talk, stretch their legs. “It is more to be there, to share. Pay attention to what he has to say. I think there are no methods or steps or ways. Every day is what she feels comfortable sharing, what is born to her. My wish is that it be a meeting of enjoyment. I want to believe that my talk and company do her good, ”concludes Dani.
the land of a
The first time we visited Pabla, we went with Soledad, a medicine woman from José de La Quintana, a town regarding 30 kilometers from Villa Ciudad de América. When she saw us arrive she was excited. Quintana, for her, are childhood memories, mythical adventures of her father, the long history of her clan. With the mischievousness that characterizes her, she asked regarding this neighbor or that, regarding businesses that no longer exist, regarding the changes in the streets, previously uninhabited. It is that Pabla was born in the area, four kilometers from the central square of the place. “If they tell me ‘go to Quintana’, I’ll go because it’s my native place”.
“I lived in part of the ranch, very close to the dike, where the power plant is, well inside the field. We had everything: cows, goats, sheep, chickens, geese, ducks. We planted everything because we had a huge space and everything was given. It was almost a virgin land, no one used it, we took out the big gourds with crooked necks that climbed, ”he says.
He worked from sunup to sundown with his whole family, “everyone even, the boys with the boys’ things, the grown-ups with their things.” It was a “fat land”, not “graphed like this”, she says and points to her patio. From Quintana they walked to Villa La Merced to look for merchandise and sell what they produced. “We did the eleven kilometers on foot. When we had meat we brought it with draft animals, if not on foot. Years working like this”.
Then came his mother’s illness, the move, the 36 years in Villa Ciudad de América, the path of medicine, the patio-nursery. Pabla points to the mountains that rise up in front of her: “I used to go through all of them, I walked those tall ones that you see there at one time, I used to go up that path, which is a construction road. There he would grab a little path that is the entire part of the edge of the mountain range, and he would go down to this other side.” She gathered weeds in a bag and put them to dry, “we walked like chivas, more in the field than at home.”
If you go up, “there is everything”. The trees and bushes cover and protect the weeds that he uses to heal. “If they get to see it, it’s a sacrificial job, because it’s kind of gross. If you do it with knowledge, no, because you look for the places, the ways to join, the ways to climb, but otherwise it is quite hard”.
The Cordovan territory, who doubts it, has undergone strong transformations since the last decades, and that affects its work. Some plants disappear, others are scarce. “The carqueja, for example, there is little or nothing, because they break it up, following the clearing they do, they take out and throw away everything and they don’t see what is good and what isn’t, so it is very unremarkable, like here, in this patio Plants grow because everything is scattered and the mountain is needed to cover and make the repair”.
Deforestation due to the advance of real estate speculation is the environmental impact “clearest and with the most direct consequences”, says Dani. “Today it is very difficult to access the mountain, everything is fenced – he adds -. Doña Pabla tells regarding the places where she went to gather weeds, what weeds she had and today, if she can access, there is none of that”.
For Dani, the rupture of the social fabric disarmed a work that was done collectively, distributing tasks, “the new generations do not even know how to recognize plants,” he explains. Pabla adds: “There is no interest in this, if it breaks it breaks, if it is lost, it is lost, if it goes away, it goes away, and this is like any other business. It’s a little job, someone might go out twice a week to collect the yerba and dry it and sell it to me, but nobody does it, you have to do it once. And that’s the sad thing, I’m not going far alone, I’m afraid of falling. So no”.
Forgetting, the expropriation and devaluation of knowledge, also affects the weeds and their collection. Pabla explains that although there are many medicinal plants, “You have to know them the same, you have to bring them, you have to manage them to make them grow, everything is a story. You have to know what time, what month, how long it takes to grow, how is the plantation, in what part, in what land, how one is managed, the other, because there are some that are more of the sand and others more of the earth, others that are, as it were, full of sun and another that are shaded and so on. Each with their right to life.
Despite the fact that her patio-nursery is not her place of origin, Pabla Olsina found a space to heal. She found a people and an environment that heals and resists. He found a job to be, believe and transform.
*By Anabella Antonelli and Juan Pablo Pantano for La Tinta / Cover image: Juan Pablo Pantano for La Tinta.
