Treating the BriBri tribe – Talamanca, Limón Province
Day 2 in the Talamanca jungle, it’s 4.45am, it’s pitch black. It’s the first morning after the first night in the depths of the jungle. Cocooned inside my mosquito net, I’m the first of the group to wake. I really do need a wee. But the toilet is in a separate hut.
I can hear monkeys screeching, and rustling in the jungle canopy, and in the matted domed roof of our open-sided lodge I sense movement.
I grab my phone, mentally pull on my big girl pants and blindly crawl out from safety onto the wooden slatted floor. Once out of the room I switch on ‘torch mode’, scanning the floor, and handrail for crawlies, creep down the stairs and venture out into the night. So far so good. I got this!
In the toilet hut there’s a single bare bulb suspended from the corrugated iron roof, casting enough light to see clearly enough, so I slip my phone into my trouser pocket (….yes, I did sleep fully clothed), scan the walls, the floor, the back of the door…..all clear. Mission accomplished, now seems like a good idea to check out the shower cubicle. And there it is……..GIANT CRAB SPIDER MONSTER THING! ……On the shower wall, waving its enormous black claw at me.
“Ha Ha! Thinking of having a shower were we? Come on in, join the party.” Arggghhhhhhhhhhh!
Phone torch on. Breathe. Back to the main lodge to wait for reinforcements.
The group starts to stir. Each is briefed. One by one we cautiously slink out to assess the situation, each of us feeling confident, that the collective brains-trust that we are, we’ll have this sorted quick sharp.
Turns out that Sir David needn’t worry about being dethroned any time soon, no-one had the faintest idea what kind of beastie we were dealing with. The consensus; it’s some sort of part crab, part spider big monster thing.
Well let none of us give up our day jobs any time soon eh?!
So the reality was, we didn’t know if we needed to be concerned or not. Were it to be an aggressive venomous cove, taken to leaping willy nilly at unsuspecting Osteopaths, or if left alone, a content, minding its own business type of dude happy to luxuriate in the occasional splash of cold water, only time would tell.
As it turned out, 5 days later, GCSMT had had a bit of a horizontal wander, but nothing more threatening than that. Had we known at the time that our friend was a Tailless Whip Scorpion (Amblypygi), and totally harmless to humans, though slightly freaked by this chaps ability to ‘see’ with his legs, we may have been a tad more relaxed about the whole thing. But things being as they were, it turned out that there really is nothing quite like the combination of an ice cold shower coupled with the threat of annihilation by beastie, to guarantee getting a wiggle on first thing in the morning.
I knew from the outset that in the jungle, we’d be working in challenging environments, and as expected, it was a full-on, hands-on, incredibly hot and sweaty, demanding and exhausting experience; but oh wow! It was so totally amazing!
5am alarm calls, the early morning screeches of the jungle barely drowning out our cold water and beastie induced screams! 15 hour days, covering tens of kilometres on foot. Trekking in 35 degrees Celsius, 95% humidity, our clothes saturated, our bodies losing water faster than we could consume it, finally returning to base camp each day after darkness had fallen.
As we made our way from one home to the next, traversing the Costa Rican jungle, crossing rivers both by boat and at times on foot, the water occasionally finding the top of our wellies, hiking up densely forested inclines, slick from the rains of the wet season now in full swing, we took each case as we found it, constantly adapting treatment techniques not only to our patients, but also to the locations we found ourselves in.
Ducking beneath t-shirts and overflowing plastic bags, clothes and belongings stored on multiple lengths of clothes line strung wall to wall.
Often working on the floor of the stilt houses still favoured by the Bri Bri people, the ground 6 feet below, visible through frequently absent floorboards. Other times working on a hastily cleared table, sturdy enough to take the weight of a child, vegetables and gigantic hands of bananas strewn at our feet, the smoke from a fire pit catching in our throats.
On our first full day in the Talamanca jungle, having been up at first light, after hours of trekking and working in the intense heat through the morning, around midday, ravenous, we arrived on foot, into a small clearing surrounded by enormous Laurel trees.
̀From the shadows came voices, “Hola! Hola! Shkẽna! Shkẽna! And there they were, the Radio Cultural La Voz team. Having pre-cooked our lunch back in Amubri village, they’d transported it all on mopeds, to the absolute middle of nowhere.
Bags overflowing with banana leaf parcels tied with twine spilled onto the ground, a plastic bucket of half-melted ice bobbed with foil topped plastic cartons of lemon juice. As parcels were untied, steam escaped in clouds carrying the first fragrant wafts of coconut and lime pork fried rice. It was absolutely delicious.
And I can say without hesitation, that that unexpected picnic in the middle of the Costa Rican jungle, sat in the shade of the jungle canopy, looking out across an endless expanse of emerald green, might actually have been one of the best things I’ve ever eaten.
Lunch break over, it was time to get back to work.
Earlier that day we’d visited the home of an 8 year old boy with autism and ADHD, a young girl plagued by migraines. We’d treated a young guy with Parkinson’s, who was struggling with muscle stiffness and lower back pain, and a couple of tribe elders, sisters suffering with abdominal discomfort, the other with neck pain .
But the most memorable session of the day was at the first home we visited that afternoon. A young teenager with cerebral palsy. 13 years old, she was wheelchair bound. With severe muscular spasticity, her head was fixed in rotation towards the left.
Chiara Fenaroli, a highly experienced Italian paediatric Osteopath, placed her hands onto the girl’s neck and shoulders.
After 30 minutes of very gentle treatment, the girl began to turn to the right side. I’ll never forget her smile as she realised she could move her head. It was an absolutely incredible outcome.
