Cowdung is medicinal

 Cowdung is Medicinal.

Many years back, when our daughter was about 4, we spent many hours cutting branches of a cactus shrub from a neighbour’s home, and planting them around our home for a fence. The next morning I was unable to open my eyes and discovered that my whole face including eyelids had swollen considerably. My daughter was also similarly affected. My neighbour Chinnapapakka, Varalu's mother, advised me to daub cowdung all over our faces. I asked if some cowdung water getting into the eyes would matter. She said that cowdung water was only good. So my daughter and I applied cowdung on our faces, and in a matter of hours, the swelling subsided.

Friends of ours in the next hamlet who had also moved from a city cautioned us saying that the germs in the cowdung may damage the eyes and we should not follow the local practices so completely. But the local people were certian, and we trusted them."

That was a step in our village growings, and a part of a long journey of understanding, trusting, living the local life. After that when our daughter got her eye poked by a stick, I handed her over to Bangaramma who cured her with some leaf juice aqpplied over three days. It trust them fully became a norm down the years.

Our own ayurvedic doctor in Chennai, Dr. P.L.T. Girija, was much more than a doctor, she was a co-traveller. At each point she strengthend us by telling us follow time tested local practices, beleiving people. It comes from a deeper larger understandind of India, and of her roots.

To rest faith in the local, with discrimination and awareness, to becomes the local, is the first step to reclaiming ourselves, our country, our polity. Without that we will stay lost.