A little dab'll do ya

You'll know how old this story is when I tell you it took place in Eleuthera, in the Bahamas, after Peggy won a trip to Club Med on that lovely isle when White Marsh Mall opened. Since our vacation in 1982, that Club Med was wiped out by a hurricane, White Marsh Mall is a virtual ghost town soon to become apartments and I don't know what-all else, and life keeps changing.

But some things don't. We happened to be taking a walk in the little town of Eleuthera, and one of the people at the resort was saying she had gotten a little too much sun the day before. A lady who was sitting in front of her house said, "Oh miss, come here, I can help!" and she broke off an aloe leaf for the woman to apply the goo to her burns. And it helped! 

We had heard of aloe, but did not know people grew it in their yards, but we found out something. The natural cures like that beat the patent medicines (with names like "BurnNoMor" and "Chill Factory") all to hell, because they are simple, and they work.

Don't believe me, ask Rakus.

Rakus is an orangutan (known in Baltimore as an "orangutang") who lives in the Suaq Balimbing research site, a rainforest in Indonesia. He had a wound on his cheek from a fight (known in Baltimore as a "scrap, fade, bangin' out!, throwing hands, or tightening up"), and he treated the wound with medicine from a tropical plant. 

Some animals are known to treat their boo-boos and illnesses with their own remedies straight out of nature. In this case, Rakus was seen plucking and chewing leaves from a plant that local humans use as a medication. Then he used his fingers to spread the plant juice from his mouth onto the sore.

AND THEN he made sort of a Band-Aid out of the chewed pulp and covered the wound.  And it healed in a few days!

“This is the first time that we have observed a wild animal applying a quite potent medicinal plant directly to a wound,” said Isabelle Laumer, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany.

Within a month, the sore spot was completely healed. 

All better, two months later!

We're still learning about self-cures and home remedies, but you'll notice that Rakus, without access to the internet and podcasts by Gwyneth Paltrow, figured out how to heal himself. Maybe that's a sign to listen to nature!