A FANTASTIC DAY IN SOCIAL ISOLATION IN MIAMI ...

A FANTASTIC DAY IN SOCIAL ISOLATION ? NO ANXIETY NO FEAR BUT SHEER JOY OF FRIENDS FROM NEAR AND FAR.  30 APRIL 2020 IN MIAMI WHICH IS UNDER LOCKDOWN

The Old soldier who had fought in Vietnam had died, carrying with him knowledge and memories. I was sad, lit candles and said Kaddish for his soul. The Jews and American Indians share certain funeral traditions, like covering the mirrors, sitting Shiva (for Indians it is 4 days) and a sendoff to the other world.

My Cuban spiritual sister from La Habana, asked me to light candles for the next three days, keep a white glass of water.

I slept very well and woke up feeling extremely well. In the words of the UmonHon Indians, I was being blessed by the departing Indian. It was almost an euphoric feeling which persisted throughout the day.

My friends always have lived in other countries. Ever since I finished my education, I have never stayed in one country or one place for one month at a time. These are challenging times of course.

A friend from Linz, had sent a message saying, that shops had been open in her town and her first purchases were two books in the Spanish language.

Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, took my heart away for a whirl of a journey.

I had just become consultant to the Traditional Kickapoo who maintain homes in Mexico, in the northern state of Coahuila ans Eagle Pass, a dusty little Texan Border town of no memorable character. On one of my visits, someone was visiting the tribe from Dallas and she invited me to come to Dallas if I am in the neighbourhood. I am sorry I do not remember her name nor what organization she worked for.

She treated me to a reasonable Tex-Mex dinner in Fort Worth, and suggested that we go to a Mexican movie which had been reviewed well over the years.

It was Like Water for Chocolate

Its effect on me was immense and immediate. The story takes place at the time of the Mexican Revolution, the place was the northern part of Coahuila which I was familiar with and also there is a connection to the Kickapoo in the film.

Food as Emotion, particularly remember when Tita the tragic heroine bakes a cake and all those eating them, because she had put so much of her emotions into it, begin to cry uncontrollably.

I felt close to my friends.

I wrote to a friend of mine in Cologne.

Books, Literature, Films, Music when shared and enjoyed together, bring friends closer. It is not something new, people have known about this for ages.

As Pablo Neruda had written in one of his poems:

I have never seen people so happy.

On this day when someone called me Joudi Joon

I felt such happiness

I felt that the old Indian wanted this for me, his parting gift

And I received confirmation from the Spiritualist in Cuba.

Claro si todo sale y tengo fe yo lo eleve y pedi por ti como gran amigo y te iluminara y que se encontrara con sus seres en otro mundo y te iluminara y al igual y yo queria que el entrara en mi cuadro spiritual.

Minutes were flowing fast, and the stream took the form of hours. I felt good toward my friends with whom I correspond regularly, as has been my custom. 

These days, I wake up when my body wakes me up. I eagerly and mindfully make Cuban coffee, the coffee actually ground by hand in the mountains of Eastern Cuba by a family that I know.

Attend to messages and if any medical advice is sought, take care of that.

Soon enough, the noon hour is here.

I go for a walk in the neighbourhood.

It is pleasant

As I was turning the corner, I noticed the skies, getting darker by the minute

I did not want to run

And the downpour was so sudden and so strong and I was wet thoroughly within a minute

I did not mind

The temperature continued its march towards the usual hot summer

Catching up on the medical literature

Noting down exciting new information

The research coming out regarding the immunological aspects of this disease would change the way the doctors will have to think in the future

Obesity is the highest risk

Apart from being Black or Poor or Both

Then comes the dietary habits

Poor quality nutrition suppresses your immunity

It may take years of good quality nutrition to reverse that

So, don’t expect immediate results with going vegan or vegetarian

What are the anthropologists thinking ?

Peruse a few journals

Light meals

Another gift

A colleague and friend, had a delicate endocrine dysfunction

After much discussion we embarked on a course of action

Within two weeks we had the results, how we could influence the precise mechanisms of the body with changes from the exterior and with helpful thinking

Without resorting to medications.

I knew it I knew it I shouted when she wrote to say: I have some news for you ..

Just wonderful

In between all these, I managed to read a few pages of the Book

Havana Red by Leonardo Padura of Havana

I have been looking forward to meeting him

Wait for the viral detective to leave us before a face to face meeting with this popular writer from Cuba.

Messages from Cuba, all very strong and optimistic . Cuba is doing a wonderful job of containing this virus. Majority of the positive  Corona virus tests are on people who are asymptomatic. That means the surveillance is excellent. A colleague of mine had to go to an isolation centre with her grandchildren when it turned out that her daughter who is a director of a hospital turned out positive. After my colleague’s test came back negative, she was allowed to return home, for 14 days of compulsory isolation and work from home and each day someone or other from the Public Health comes to enquire about her.

Good Luck Cuba, you with your just sense of caring for your people.

A nice conversation with my erudite psychiatrist friend who lives in Buenos Aires

What all happens in the course of a day?

I thought of my illustrious friend Dr. Tan

President of the International Zheng He society, based in Singapore

I found a book amidst my electronic collections

What a coincidence!

Hormuz! Jews in the Persian Gulf.. Iran and its dynasties

All the things I love

I won’t be allowed to visit Hormuz by the bearded ones of Iran

Dr Tan had wanted me to take a group of Zheng He enthusiasts to Hormuz and Oman

I had visited, more than once, the harbor Zheng He stayed while his boats underwent repair

The Magical Salalah in Dhofar

Chinese porcelain discovered in UAE shows 700 years of Relations

Experts find early evidence of diplomatic relations between China and Julfar, the medieval predecessor of Ras Al Khaimah

how nice to find this chapter about the jewish presence in the Persian Gulf countries from the 7th Century onwards. Jews have been present in Iran since time immemorial.

Rains had stopped as is their custom in these parts of the world

People have been fast asleep for hours in

Cochin Kuala Lumpur Sriracha Karaj Haifa Linz Bruselas Cologne
Had to explain to someone in Thailand that the danger is on its way out

An Indian elder called, he just wanted to say Hello

Elders of the Indian tribes are treasures of Humanity

It is my duty to protect them

“Um ancião indígena que morre é uma perda para toda a humanidade”, diz Márcio Meira

Today has been an extraordinarily euphoric day

Thank you, the Old Indian Soldier of wisdom

My spiritual sister in Havana, Cuba

My friends near and far .. Love you all.

My good friend the psychiatrist from Buenos Aires sent me this video

Here is a video from Buenos Aires

We say, Family you cannot choose but Friends certainly you can choose .

The clock has struck midnight
I have been up since 9 am 
This has been such a good day in the Isolation ? in Miami

Feel very grateful 
Including the music that I can stream on line 

 Okay, Habibi, move over.. thanks for the Flower..

ah mi buenos aires querido..

I usually take my blood pressure at this time of the night 

This is incredibly good.
Life has become a meditation 
Mindfulness of the present
Cant even plan a trip? a visit to the Indigenous people of the Amazonia? Not possible at the moment
Very content ..Very grateful
I want to thank all of you 
Meus amigos 

Little bit more of Havana Red before falling asleep ..

MY HEART IS BROKEN OVER THE PLIGHT OF THE INDIANS OF THE AMAZONIA AT THIS DIFFICULT TIMES

Para escapar do coronavírus, Yanomami se refugiam no interior da Floresta

To escape the Coronavirus, Yanomami take refuge in the Interior of the Forest

My Heart is Broken tonight

It is with the Ticuna, Yanomami, Kokomo

Warao from Orinoco had left the dire economic situation in Tucupita

Arrive in Manaus only to find themselves isolated, without water, without soap, without food .

The virus has arrived in the Amazonia, those Indians who live in cities are the ones in the danger of dying. Whether it would reach the interior of the Amazon forest is not known. But elders tell stories of escaping to the forest to escape from the diseases of outsiders.

Not all know how to get back to the forest

Also, they want to be close to the medical attention

But some have left for the Interior of the forest and there they would stay for 40 days in temporary lodgings

“Quando uma família vai, outras famílias vão, a vizinhada vai. Porque na comunidade somos todos parentes, então eles levaram toda a família”, disse a liderança indígena. Cada grupo está construindo pequenos abrigos para morar por cerca de 40 dias. Além de se manterem com frutas, caça e pesca, levam alimentos. Se for necessário, voltam à comunidade para reforçar os mantimentos. “Levaram alimentos principais como farinha, banana, tapioca, beiju, e também café, açúcar, arroz, feijão e materiais de caça e pesca. E quando acaba os alimentos eles vêm buscar banana, pegar estoque de farinha”, relata Góes.

“Deixar as casas e ficar por um tempo na floresta é uma estratégia que algumas famílias já estão fazendo. Diferente de nós que estamos enfrentando pela primeira vez uma epidemia, os Yanomami têm experiências recentes que dizimaram comunidades inteiras e os sobreviventes foram os que se isolaram no mato”, explica o assessor do Programa Rio Negro do Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), Marcos Wesley de Oliveira.

The incessant incursions into their lands by Brasilians, encouraged by their President, had made many an indigenous person to move to the only city in the Amazonian region. There they live in crowded conditions. Soon they get used to the food that is freely available in the markets.

Many people had forgotten how to survive in the jungle, so they had to take sugar coffee etc. with them . But they had gone to isolate themselves!

The Indigenous people remember the other times, in their oral histories, when they had gone back to the forest to escape the illnesses of the society.

I was reading an on line journal called Amazonia Real, rather good journalism and photographs, when I read the heartbreaking story of the Warao Indians from Orinoco (I had visited them there) now refugees in Manaus, and exposed to the ill elements conducive of sickness?

What right the conquistadores and their children have to make the indigenous people who have lived there for time immemorial, refugees .. In short 500 years the owners of the land have become beggars.

Imagine a Warao from Orinoco who speaks warao language, becoming a refugee in Manaus which is the capital of Amazonas state in Brasil, where the language is Portuguese, the Indians they meet do not speak a native  language they can understand. Imagine how marginalized they must feel, they are no longer in their own country, here they are with Portuguese speaking foreigners and when they meet other indigenous people they cant communicate with them.

 Warao from Tucupita in Orinoco, now refugees in Manaus, Amazonas.

Coronavírus: “Um ancião indígena que morre é uma perda para toda a humanidade”, diz Márcio Meira

I have always felt a great responsibility of protecting the lives of the elderly indigenous people. They are living libraries of their cultures and loosing one is to loose a library.

when an elderly Indian dies, it is a loss for the entire humanity, says Marcio Meira, an anthropologist in Brasil.

 Dr Israel Tuyuka of the Tuyuka tribe had to end his medical studies earlier than expected and he was handed his medical diploma one week ago and dispatched to the Urgent care section of a hospital in the city of Manaus where he studied.

Good Luck, Dr Israel, hope we can meet each other one day in the Indian country near Manaus.

Masks in Manaus

Indigenous people making their own masks in Manaus, Amazonia, Brasil. 

My dear brothers and sisters along the Amazon River.. Sorry I am not with you, but I will be, as soon as possible and I promise to spend more time with you. I no longer need the comforts of the big city life.

I will be on that little boat plying upstream to Nazareth from the tri border town of Leticia in Colombia .. ojala, pronto..

ISRAELI INNOVATIONS HERE TO STAY: A BOON TO ISOLATED INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES

The world-wide shut down has been observed to various degrees in different parts of the world. Israel was one of the first countries to shut down its borders, impose lockdown. 
That meant, they had to come up with innovations to their already strong Public Health Sector.
Israel like all developed nations on earth (with the notable exception of USA) is a public health oriented health care system, where the latest technology as well as simple family oriented medical care is available to all the population  without a fee.
One of the fall outs of the stay at home orders is that there would be a growth in the telemedicine practice.
Indigenous peoples of USA has a public health oriented, not fee for service, community orientation and an adaptation of some of the Israeli technology would be extremely useful. I have been in native villages in the USA which are virtually hours away by car from the nearest health care facility. In the case of the indigenous people along the Amazon, this technology would be so helpful.
All social science oriented health care providers and we have a good few serving the Indians in the USA, know that Medications alone, while necessary, account only about 25% (that is a generous estimate, official studies put it at around 10%) of the healing that takes place. 
Among the traditional Indians that I have worked in the Americas, the relationship takes the number one place and the fact that they are being cared for, also adds to the healing.
In the following video, one can see that this is not high-tech and can be easily adopted.
I would be eager to know more about this innovation from Israel, the Start Up Nation, bringing help to the world in its many forms.

THE AFTERNOON RAIN IN THE TROPICS

Miami is the only part of the Continental USA that can be called Tropical. and the rain here is truly a show of strength and power and fury and then calm and peace. The rain does not last here long, and it is usually in the afternoon when the skies lash our their fury, clean the earth and leave the inhabitants, human and otherwise in peace, to enjoy the benefits.

It also happened this afternoon

and it was such a pleasure to be looking at it

from the comfort of the home.

In both places, Miami and La Habana, you can enjoy this sudden tropical downpours, in the spring and autumn but with much more frequency in the summer..

MASKS: THE FEAR OF THE OTHER AND OTHER THOUGHTS OF LIMINALITY

There is no visible symbol in the west that has been associated with another entire hemisphere such as the MASK. People stared at Japanese tourists politely had their masks on when they had symptoms of fever or the flu while traveling in the west. Japanese well known for their civic responsibility, wanted to protect the innocent westerners from any illness.

Whether masks protect the wearer from an illness is not the question but why such stigma against those who wear the mask? We are talking about the ordinary face mask now worn by nearly half the humanity during these difficult times of a pandemic.

I had earlier written a blog about the history of the face mask and the illustrious Chinese doctor from Penang, Dr. Wu who can be considered the father of the modern mask.

(Dr Wu Liande of Penang, who was in charge of controlling the Pneumonic Plague in Mongolia in 1910)

The use of the masks spread in the East, mainly in Korea, China, Taiwan, Vietnam and Hong Kong during the last SARS epidemic. Currently, it is those who DO NOT wear the mask that are stigmatized, in those countries, in harmony with their concepts of  civic responsibility.

In the west at least, Mask has been associated with the OTHERNESS. History will tell us that the plague of the middle ages was associated with the OTHER of that time, the Jews. Right now, many people in the west link this virus to China and thus, by default,  all of Asia. In all western countries there have been reactions against Chinese and “Chinese looking” people, let us hope that this is just sporadic and will disappear.

Being an anthropologist, I wanted to delve into the symbolism of the Masks and of course once you are outside the western purveyance, one encounters all sorts of ritual masks, in Mexico, in West Africa and in Asia.

 (Buffalo mask of the American Indian)

There is another aspect I never thought of, which was brought to my attention by BS, from Wuhan City. She pointed out that the aspects of the face covered in China is very different from those parts of the face covered in the West.

She sent me two images, one of a Chinese hero, his distinct features of nose, mouth and chin covered with eyes open, whereas the western hero (Hollywood style) had his eyes covered, leaving the chiseled facial features visible. In the west, villains and robbers and murderers are featured with facial masks, covering their features.

So, in the west, the upper part is covered and in the east, the lower part of the face is covered. She explained that the Chinese hero does not wish to distinguish himself from the mass of the people, whereas the western hero is distinct from the common person.

That made me think, which part of the face did Robin Hood cover?

Robin hood had much symbolism but mask was not one of them. Few centuries later when Highway robbery was in vogue, the highwaymen did wear masks over their eyes.

My friend from Wuhan made me think of the upper and lower part of the face. I was reminded of the Russian linguist and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin and his grotesque realism (his analysis of the 15^th? Century epic Pantagruel).  This could be seen clearly at the Carnival in Venice with its elegance and emphasis on the upper body and the lower body accent on the carnivals in the south. In both contexts, one uses the word, carnivalesque. 

VENICE

(You should be able to guess which country this is from?)

During my early years in Havana, I would come across the grotesque but I did not like the word nor the concept.

At the time of Dr Wu, wearing a mask was seen as a sign of medical modernity, and as we do now, a joint statement for the welfare of the society.

This morning at the supermarket, everyone was wearing a mask and there was a sense of solidarity which was absent just a few weeks ago. This sense of civic solidarity has been an Asian characteristic for a long time and it would be a welcome addition to the Western characteristic.

I would also think of Mask as a Metaphor, especially in context of internationalisations of cultural identities. It is becoming more and more difficult to ascribe cultural identities to faces. Thus an “Indian” or an “Asian” face has become a mask. A Cambodian Chinese born in Paris, now identifies himself as French, while his face carries the vestiges of China, his mind has eradicated both China and Cambodia out of his face. But face is such a strong identification of cultural identity, perhaps that underlies the bullying of two Singaporean students in Melbourne, Australia on a tram, face identifying them with their ancestral homeland. On the other hand, as both Philipp Rossler in Germany and Fleur Pellerin in France has shown, the inner self can be, as “strong as a bamboo”, while the mask becomes just a nuisance. Both adopted at days and months of age, rose to very high political positions in Germany and France.

ex-Minister for External Trade for France 

ex-Vice-Chancellor of Germany

There is another type of mask, which is much less healthy. All people living in the west are aware of the people wearing this mask, best enunciated by that Martinican Intellectual Franz Fanon in his 1952 book: Peau Noire, Masques Blancs.

"The divided self-perception of a Black Subject who has lost his native cultural origin, and embraced the culture of the Mother Country, produces an inferior sense of self in the "Black Man." They will try to appropriate and imitate the culture of the colonizer where such behaviour is more readily evident in upwardly mobile and educated Black people who can afford to acquire status symbols within the world of the colonial ecumene, such as an education abroad and mastery of the language of the colonizer, the white masks"                           

Most of the masks I have come across are ritualistic ones, whether in Mexico or Kerala. In some there is a sense of liminality, a human has become a spirit or in the in between state, where he, the human is in the process of being transported as a spirit medium or hollow bone to heal the sick.

Raven Mask of the Tlingit of Alaska

 Theyyam in Kerala India

Tibetan Buddhist Mask in Bhutan

Yoruba in West Africa 

Bling Masks, the new ritual masks of the celebrities?

Here is a quote from an anthropologic text:

As a consequence of the depolarization of boundaries separating self and other, conscious and unconscious, material and spirit that occurs in altered consciousness, ritual participants find themselves in a highly suggestive state in which they believe the shaman "is" the spirit or god represented in the ritual and that the ritual outcomes will be effective. The masking ritual, then, is the means by which performers and participants can, under the auspices of culturally accepted practices, safely step from behind their personae to reveal their essential self by immersing themselves in the mythic divine represented through the transforming power of the mask.

These days  where time is carrying thought from Wuhan to Miami to American Indians and Europe at the speed of light, a great sense of satisfaction in the mind, that unites the world.

For Min.

One of the nicest masks I have seen in my travels belongs to Kathakali

a ritualistic dance performed in certain parts of Kerala, India.

As the first of the year was arriving by the Arabian Sea, we were seated in the lawn of Bristow Lighthouse Bungalow Hotel in Fort Cochin watching a Kathakali performance