Within the coronary heart of Siquijor province within the southern Philippines lies the secluded mountain village of Cantabon. Amid the verdant bushes, the therapeutic hut, or balay pahi-uli, of shamans Noel and Juanita Torremocha stands as a serene sanctuary, providing solace to sufferers in search of conventional people cures.
Siquijor is famed for its thriving conventional therapeutic practices that draw a various crowd, together with worldwide guests, in search of cures for a wide selection of well being issues starting from easy sprains to extreme illnesses like most cancers. The Torremochas are a part of a neighborhood of 300 mananambal, or healers, who’ve stored this heritage alive for generations.
On a sunny morning in December 2023, the couple attend to an aged girl who’s come from a close-by island province complaining of arm ache. The girl removes her sneakers on the hut’s lanai, the place a rack of amulets and potions are on show. Juanita, 64, gently guides her into the therapy room, enclosed by partitions of woven bamboo strips.
Inside, Noel, 54, has the affected person sit on a wood stool. An altar adorned with miniature statues of outstanding Catholic figures stands behind him, testifying to the Philippines’ standing as the biggest Catholic nation in Asia. As he listens to the lady recount the origins of her ailment, Noel’s proper hand rests atop a wood desk laden with massive bottles stuffed to the brim with concoctions of oil and extracts of medicinal vegetation.
Subsequent, Noel begins the tuob ritual, a type of fumigation believed to dispel illness and fend off unhealthy spells. He places a small pot stuffed with ashes and oil below a stool and lights it. Juanita then drapes the affected person girl in a gentle yellow blanket, trapping the heat inside. Because the smoke billows, it enveloped the affected person. Then Noel uncovers her and rubs a therapeutic combination into her proper palm, kneading the sore limb as he intones a prayer.
The Torremochas and different mananambals in Siquijor are extra than simply bearers of historical therapeutic traditions and supernatural beliefs. Unknown to many, they’re additionally guardians of the forests, which they contemplate sources of therapeutic and the dwelling locations of spirits, each benevolent and malevolent.
Many of the healers stay close to Mount Bandilaan Nationwide Park, a 271-hectare (670-acre) protected forest reserve. Bandilaan is Siquijor’s highest peak, at 557 meters (1,827 ft).
Its forests are dwelling to 188 recognized plant species, of which 19 are thought of threatened, in accordance with a 2019 floristic evaluation by consultants from Bohol Island State College and the College of the Philippines Los Baños. A 2021 research discovered the park can also be dwelling to seven amphibian species, 12 hen species and eight bat species, a few of that are endemic and endangered within the Philippines.
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[Our] analysis [showed] that Siquijor’s ‘mysticism’ just isn’t resulting from witchcraft or voodoo, however the folks’s huge wealth of well being data and practices.
Josel Mansueto, professor, Siquijor State School
By each conventional practices and a authorities reforestation initiative, efforts to guard the park from deforestation and degradation contribute to combating local weather change and preserving the island’s wealthy biodiversity.
‘Destined to heal’
Juanita grew up aiding her father, Pedro Tumapon, a legendary healer in Siquijor. When her father died in 2007, she says, she initially hesitated to take up his legacy. However she felt compelled by her conscience, she says. “Your future to heal others was imprinted in your palm from a younger age,” Juanita tells Mongabay, sitting on a wood bench on the lanai of their balay pahi-uli.
Native beliefs warn that ignoring the decision to heal brings misfortune. “If you happen to don’t settle for it, you might face opposed penalties,” Juanita says. “After my father’s loss of life, I used to be always sick, affected by again and head ache. Nevertheless, as soon as I started the therapeutic journey, I ended falling sick, because of God’s mercy.”
The Torremochas’ home isn’t with out guests. The couple begin their day with a prayer as quickly as daybreak breaks, realizing they may have friends at any second. Sufferers from close by cities and provinces typically arrive so early that the couple are nonetheless asleep.
“We don’t ask for cash from individuals who search our therapeutic skills,” Noel tells his affected person, who seems to be relieved. “We’re content material with no matter donations we obtain, whether or not financial or in form.” For them, Noel says, their reward of therapeutic just isn’t a commodity to be traded, however a blessing to be shared freely, particularly to the poor who lack the means to entry Western medication.
Sustainable practices
Of the pair, Noel has a deeper data of Bandilaan’s medicinal assets. When his father-in-law was nonetheless alive, Noel accompanied him to gather these vegetation in the course of the Holy Week, which can also be the time of Siquijor’s annual therapeutic pageant.
From 2014 to 2019, consultants from Siquijor State School, Negros Oriental State College, the College of the Philippines Manila, and the Philippines’ Division of Science and Expertise documented the Indigenous native therapeutic practices and ethnopharmacological data of the communities in Siquijor. The research recognized as much as 218 plant species utilized by people healers. These vegetation, primarily from six households, are largely discovered on Mt. Bandilaan.
Noel says he realized to recognise such vegetation by their look, odor and style, and to make use of them properly and respectfully. For seven consecutive Fridays ending on Good Friday, he leads a bunch of herb gatherers who set out early within the morning and enterprise deep into Bandilaan. “The journey is hard,” he says. “You must ascend additional, you’ll face all types of animals, like bees that sting.”
They observe pangalap (gathering) strategies which are sustainable, solely pruning bushes and herbs to advertise progress and allow their yearly harvest. “We go away particularly the mature ones unhurt. If we have been to extract them utterly, proper as much as their roots, they are going to die,” Noel says.
“The forest is a pharmacy, a laboratory and a library of infinite knowledge, that’s why it’s essential to us,” Junel Tomaroy, one other famend people healer, tells Mongabay. “On the subject of accumulating herbs, that’s the place you possibly can see the respect. The healers have a restrict as a result of in a yr we solely accumulate for seven days. Once we come again subsequent yr, the department we minimize has sprouted and change into three or two.”
Folks healers say the optimum time to collect pure cures from medicinal vegetation and bushes is from morning till midday, once they say these vegetation have the best efficiency. They honour the late afternoon and nighttime hours because the time once they say the spirits wander again to the forest. “They arrive out at night time, they’ll see us, however we are able to’t see them,” Noel says.
“We ask for permission earlier than we collect herbs there, or we request it via goals, which exhibits respect,” Tomaroy says. “You may really feel it in case you are actually delicate. They may push you away while you go there in the event that they don’t such as you.” Those that persist with out consent may get misplaced or wounded within the forest, fall sick, and even die, he provides.
“[Our] analysis [showed] that Siquijor’s ‘mysticism’ just isn’t resulting from witchcraft or voodoo, however the folks’s huge wealth of well being data and practices,” Josel Mansueto, a professor at Siquijor State School who led the 2014-2019 mission, tells Mongabay.
The Philippine authorities’s Nationwide Greening Program contracted the Cantabon Healers Affiliation to plant medicinal vegetation and bushes throughout 80 hectares (almost 200 acres) of forest on Mt. Bandilaan between 2011 and 2013. With an 80 per cent survival fee, this initiative ensures that these forest assets will proceed to develop for generations, performing their very important sociocultural, ecological and financial capabilities, in accordance with Siquijor’s Provincial Setting and Pure Assets Workplace (PENRO).
“We encourage [local healers] to plant these medicinal bushes and vegetation of their respective backyards by partnering with us, in order that we are able to protect them throughout the timberland areas,” Paul Tomogsoc, a senior environmental administration specialist at PENRO, tells Mongabay. The reforestation efforts are aligned with the provincial authorities’s aim of additional rising the island’s forested space, which presently stands at 1,179 hectares (2,914 acres).
Forest conservation
Siquijor’s tree cowl shrank by simply 1.7 per cent, or 238 hectares (588 acres) from 2001 to 2022, in comparison with 7.6 per cent for the entire of the Philippines, World Forest Watch information present. A 2012 research from Siquijor State School suggests that people therapeutic traditions and non secular beliefs could contribute to the conservation of the island’s forests, significantly these surrounding a river thought of sacred.
“We discovered that the folks have beliefs on the existence of the spirits within the space, and that the river must be shared with them, too,” says Mansueto, who additionally led that research.
“Given this, folks follow accountable utilisation of the forest and the river in order to not anger the spirits. Subsequently, once they get vegetation and herbs for use for therapeutic, they don’t exploit the assets. They be certain that they solely get what they want.”
Tomogsoc additionally factors to PENRO’s ongoing lively involvement within the marketing campaign towards unlawful logging, which incorporates regulation enforcement and an data drive. This has helped instill a way of stewardship amongst residents, motivating them to guard and preserve their forests, he says.
He says forest conservation is significant for Siquijor, a small island measuring 34,350 hectares (84,880 acres) and weak to local weather crisis-driven typhoons — the primary risk to the province’s forests. “That is important for combating local weather change; we can not survive with out the forest,” Tomogsoc says.
With a rise in tourism, PENRO is collaborating with the native authorities to find out the island’s carrying capability — probably the most vacationers it might probably accommodate at a time with out harming its ecology, tradition and economic system.
The healers’ affiliation agrees with the federal government and helps its numerous initiatives, from reforestation to reporting violators. “The forest is our supply of wellness and livelihood,” says Aniceta Ponce, president of Siquijor’s conventional healers’ affiliation. “All of the herbs we want are there within the forest, so we protect it, we don’t break it. That’s the reason you don’t see us chopping the bushes right here in Siquijor.
“We preserve them as a result of it offers us safety when there’s a storm or an earthquake. What if there aren’t any bushes left? There could be no safeguard for our watershed. We’d be defenceless towards extreme warmth,” she provides.
Fading away
However the native therapeutic traditions are progressively fading away because of the progress of tourism and intercultural trade, the loss of life of previous healers, and the emergence of expertise and Western healthcare services, Mansueto’s crew notes in its research.
Mansueto is presently engaged on books that intention to coach locals, particularly college students, concerning the well being data and practices of the Siquijor mananambals, and the way these relate to preserving forest assets.
“By these studying supplies, they are going to be capable to proceed their well being data and be pleased with their tradition, whereas additionally being empowered to guard the setting and pure assets,” she says. “They may know that all the pieces they should preserve their well being and wellness is principally from Mom Nature.”
As for healers like Noel, they permit their kids and youthful family members to witness their practices: “However the resolution to observe the decision and stick with it our cherished custom for future generations is finally theirs.”
This story was revealed with permission from Mongabay.com.
