Just KIS Me: A Neighboring Project focused on Plants and Indigenous Culture

Just KIS Me: A Neighboring Project focused on Plants and Indigenous Culture

By Kealy Rudersdorf

About eight years ago, Kealy and Ivannia were talking about how they wanted to continue to be strong, badass women. They wanted to support one another and thrive, and step outside the stereotypical woman’s role that is often seen in the Mastatal community. Kealy was once again visiting for a few months from the States and was leaving in a few days so plans needed to happen soon!

The previous year, they had decided to go to the river at night to catch shrimp together--the snakes and darkness under the new moon never scared them off.  This year, they were going to bushwhack to the top of La Cangreja National Park mountain. If you have gone in recent years, this was before the path was maintained and the hike was truly an adventure in the jungle. They needed a guide, as neither had ever been. Ivannia suggested her cousin, Solin, who was incredible with the machete and always full of jokes. It was bound to be a great day!

That day marked the very beginning of KIS Botanicals, as Solin described different uses of a variety of plants and Solin and Ivannia shared stories about how their family used the different plants they found along the trail. It was an immemorable day, filled with laughter, love, and the sharing of stories - the same energy we strive to bring with us into KIS Botanicals today!

What is KIS Botanicals?

KIS Botanicals is a growing herbal business, up the road from the well-known Rancho Mastatal. We are focused on the preservation of plant knowledge and culture in the Mastatal/Zapaton region of Costa Rica. As Solin and Ivannia say, our ancestors have a beautiful interwoven history with plants from the rainforest; our goal is to awaken and share this history.

In our project, we make a series of plant-based, herbal products (to heal the skin, aide in sleep…), using recipes we learned from our grandparents and community members. We also provide educational programs for locals and tourists through medicine making workshops, medicinal plant tours, and food-as-medicine classes.

PRODUCTS

Our artisanal products are inspired by tried-and-true recipes. All of our plants are hand-harvested and our products are handmade – by us!   We have access to nearly 100 different medicinal plants that Solin farms sustainably, using traditional agriculture and permaculture techniques.

We currently have 8 artisanal herbal products that we absolutely love! These include a skin healing salve, a muscle and bruise salve, a sleep aide tincture, a tincture for colds and flus, a cough tincture, a bug repellent, an immune booster tincture, and a bug bite relief roll-on.  There are many more products in the works, for example an aphrodisiac spray, an anti-fungal spray, stomach calming tincture, energy clearing spray, anti-anxiety tincture, etc. With so many plants to choose from, it’s hard to know where to start! As our apothecary grows, we will continue to add to our line of products. 

When we start to make a new product, first, Solin and Ivannia remember plant uses they’ve witnessed throughout their lives. In addition, we frequently talk to community elders or remember conversations from years past. With these memories and conversations, we make a list of plants. We spend time trialing recipes and researching to make sure our products are stellar.  The stories and memories are shared on the back of our products, so you too can share in the story!

Currently, we are selling our products at our wonderful friends and neighboring projects: Rancho Mastatal, Villas Mastatal, La Iguana Chocolate and La Choza del Mundo. 

EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS

We are excited to offer a variety of educational programs. Come, partake in our programs - we can’t wait to learn with you! Here are our current and future offerings: 

A Cultural and Medicinal Plant Walking Tour:   Come walk leisurely with us while we share with you our local history and culture. We will bring artifacts and stories from our grandparents' lives and describe the uses of many of our medicinal plants.   We will provide a tasty and traditional treat or drink! 

Medicine Making Workshop:  Together, we will enjoy a short leisurely walk to explore medicinal plants.  We will share with you an ancestral recipe (or two!). Tradition will be combined with modern herbal techniques.   You will leave with an herbal product, made by you! 

Food is Medicine – A Traditional Cooking Class:  Come to a cooking class, using traditional techniques and foods.  Over a wood burning stove, we will share a traditional recipe (or two!), laughs and stories.

In the future, we plan to offer an intensive two-week long course on cultural and medicinal plants. We will offer the opportunity to learn from us and other community members, as well as play and experiment with our farm of medicinal tropical plants. Your teachers will be primary-source voices! 

Once we are properly on our feet, we plan to provide classes to the local schools.  We will teach students about how their/our ancestors used plants to cook, to clean, and to heal.  Students will learn new and old techniques with hands-on lessons and tutorials. We hope that they take these lessons back home with them and share their enthusiasm with their parents and grandparents, calling forth memories and providing inspiration.  We are SO excited about providing this service to our community. 

Who is KIS Botanicals? 

The original KIS Botanical team consists of three people: Ivannia, Solin and Kealy. Ivannia and Solin are cousins and lifelong members of the Mastatal / Zapaton community and grew up learning about the medicinal plants in the area.  Ivannia is a wiz in the kitchen. She is the one responsible for processing the plants, making the products, and giving thanks to the plants as we compost them.  Solin has been working with plants his entire life, being handed a machete as a 2-year-old. The depth of his plant knowledge, understanding of nature, and love of plants is key to KIS’s success. Kealy has been visiting the Mastatal / Zapaton area for over 11 years, and Solin and Kealy are now married with a baby. Her role in KIS is to research plants, formulate recipes, share her knowledge of making shelf stable herbal products, translate our programs into English, promote KIS with marketing, and give the plants extra love.

Why we started KIS Botanicals?

From the words of Ivannia and Solin:  We started KIS because we saw our generation and the following generations pull away from plants and the environment.  We witnessed the high schoolers obsessed with their new cell phones and motorcycles, littering the street with their chip wrappers and soda bottles. Our community was changing dramatically. Starting in the late 1980s, houses received electricity, running water, and phones, but also within that same generation, the community received access to the internet, cell phones arrived, and all of a sudden there was almost a motorbike or car per person in town. In most of the United States and Europe, these changes happened over several generations.

 We have witnessed a huge disconnect from our ancestors and the understanding of how they lived in harmony with the rainforest. This younger generation has mostly left the area for other opportunities after high school, leaving the community void of a generation.  With KIS Botanicals, we hope to show that our ancestor’s way of life continues to have value. We aim to re-awaken our ancestral plant knowledge in the younger generations with our products and educational programs within local schools. We also want to be an example of how to be a successful, locally owned business, making our local economy stronger and more diverse. 

How to help us?? 

We have come a long way from 3 friends bushwhacking to the top of the La Congreja mountain to making KIS Botanicals a reality.  To be successful in preserving and sharing our ancestral knowledge, we need your help!! This is what would be most helpful to us:

 When you visit Costa Rica, come to the town of Mastatal to buy our products and learn with us by signing up for one of our educational programs.

 Help us spread the word. Tell your friends and family about us. If they plan to visit Costa Rica, encourage them to take a workshop or tour with us and check out our products.  

 DONATE!  Keep your eyes peeled.  Shortly we will be fund raising to build a Ministry of Health approved processing kitchen.  We would greatly appreciate your assistance in reaching this goal!!

 Send us love and positive energy.

 Like us on Facebook and follow us on Instagram @KISBotanicals

 We can be contacted at KISBotanicals@gmail.com.

 Thanks for your support! We hope to see you soon.

With love,

Ivannia, Solin and Kealy

Book Recommendations: The Titles I Read this Fall

Book Recommendations: The Titles I Read this Fall

by Tim O’Hara

Last year I wrote a short article about the books that I read while visiting my family last fall in the United States.  I received a handful of positive responses after we posted it to the Ranch’s blog and as a result I thought that I’d go ahead and repeat the exercise this year.  The books below are in the order that I read them.  I would recommend and learned something important from all of them.  A few of them impacted me profoundly.  I will try to incorporate the lessons that I learned in many of these books into my personal and work life.  

Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America by Juan Gonzalez
This book evoked Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States of America and Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America.  It’s an enlightening look at latino history from the perspective of the oppressed and highlights their role, courage and sacrifice in modern American history.  If you’re interested in obtaining a more balanced look at Latin American history, add this one to your collection.        

The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder's Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows by Kent Newburn
Rich Esposito, a former visitor to the Ranch, gifted me and the Ranch both this book and The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo: A Child, an Elder, and the Light from an Ancient Sky (see below).  They are books 2 and 3 in Kent Nerbern’s trilogy about the author’s time spent with a Lakota elder named Dan and some of his closest friends.  All 3 books affected me deeply.  I can highly recommend them all.  I think that it would be beneficial if they were required reading in public high schools throughout the US.  If more people read stories like this, their impact might bring us closer, faster to the type of society that I aspire to live in.  Ceremony, slowing down, deep listening, honor and respect are themes that seem to have less and less room in our modern, high-paced, sometimes dysfunctional society.  I will be doubling down on my commitment to these lessons as I try to improve myself and dedicate my work to creating an alternative model to the broken communities that many of us live in.

Overstory:  A Novel by Richard Powers 
This book was recommended to me by a visitor to the Ranch in August.  I picked it up as soon as we arrived to the States.  It read much like a Barbara Kingsolver novel.  Mr. Powers weaves together the lives of a disparate collection of people around the theme of the power and importance of trees.  Wow.  If you’re a tree lover, get your hands on this book.  If you believe in the power of trees, buy this book.  If you want to better understand the critical role that trees play in our ecosystem, borrow this book from your local library.  If this book were required reading for everyone we might become better stewards of the magical, rooted beings that gift us life. 

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang 
After getting sucked back into the US political scene this fall, I decided, based on Brian “Sparky” O’Rourke’s suggestion, to pick up and read 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang’s book about his thoughts on Universal Basic Income (UBI), the state of academia, and the changing landscape of the US economy and how it’s being revolutionized by automation.  It was a pretty quick read and one full of provocative and compelling snippets that got me thinking differently about what our future may hold.  I like Mr. Yang’s straightforward and compassionate style and it seems as if many people in the US electorate agree as I’ve watched his poll numbers creep upwards ever since he’s walked onto the national stage.  

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer 
This book, loaned to us from 2019 Apprentice Abby Kuchar, is a must-read.  The author, based in Upstate NY not far from where I grew up, takes both a scientific and spiritual look at plants and their critical importance to the human species.  The book is beautifully written and touches on difficult subjects in a way that feels both profound and accessible.  This book should arguably have a place in everyone’s library.  My sense is that if you read this book every year that you’d continue to glean something life-changing from it with each read.  It’s a perspective changer in the best way.  Ms. Kimmerer has a way of bringing together the gifts of indigenous cultures and the practicalities of science to show us a path on how we can live on this planet in a way that might be necessary if Homo sapiens are to stick around much longer.       

The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo: A Child, an Elder, and the Light from an Ancient Sky by Kent Newburn
I read this book in 2 days.  I could not put it down.  I think that everyone that reads this book, especially white people born in the United States, will benefit from the lessons herein and the important stories that take a candid look at American Indian life.  Be prepared to shed tears of both joy and anguish.  This was my favorite book of the trilogy (outlined above).  I didn’t want it to end.  These stories seem critical to share.  I want to shout from the top of lungs, “read this book!”.  I would like to buy a copy for every high school English classroom and everyone I’ve every met.  Mr. Nerburn has a gift for sharing the stories of American Indians in a way that is consequential and educational to non-Indians. 

Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes
Mary’s straightforward and matter-of-fact storytelling shares the story of the plight of the modern American Indian from the oftentimes unheard woman’s perspective.  This is an intimate, candid, first-hand look at the tragedy and beauty of American Indian life.  This important story includes first hand accounts of the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building in Washington D.C. in 1972 and the protests and incident at Wounded Knee in 1973.  Mary’s a courageous woman who has inspired a generation of American Indian women to be proud of their heritage and fight for the rights of this land’s original stewards.        

Trees of Power: Ten Essential Arboreal Allies by Akiva Silver
Akiva Silver, the founder of Twisted Tree Farm in Spencer, NY not far from my mom’s home in Binghamton, NY, is an agroforestry innovator, farmer and nursery manager who’s having a profound impact in this region of the United States and beyond.  I love his philosophy and dedication to spreading the gospel of temperate perennial tree producers.  The book is inspirational and practical with the second half of the book focusing on 10 agroforestry species that with large scale plantings could get humans thinking differently about food production and how to feed the world.  Akiva and his family are doing important work in this part of the world.  If you’re in the Northeast, check out his farm and nursery and if you’re looking for trees to plant on your farm, in your yard, or throughout your community, Twisted Tree should be at the top of your list to check out.    

Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West by Hampton Sides
This book was recommended to me by my sister-in-law Tracy.  It’s about the life of frontiersman Kit Carson and the conquest of the the American West by the U.S. government.  It’s a tragic recount of the continuous wars between Britain, Spain, Mexico and various American Indian tribes and the fledgling United States.  The common thread that runs through this story is one of deception, broken promises and treaties, massacre and murder.  I felt that Mr. Sides did a reasonable job in presenting a somewhat objective history of the horrors of how the country of my birth realized its “manifest destiny” through the eyes of one of its most well-known adventurers and pioneers.   

Happy reading to you all.  I’m always looking for book recommendations so let me know if there’s anything in your library that you think that I would enjoy and/or learn from. 

Abrazos, 

Tim