by Liz Sinclair

Created on: August 03, 2009

The name Ubud comes from obat which is the Balinese word for herb, Lilir said. So it literally means 'place of herbs.' This area has always been a centre for healing.

I had organised to meet Lilir on the main street in Ubud, busy with the roar of motorcycles and the beep-beep of horns. She led me up a steep concrete drive that climbed a hill and ended abruptly in bright green rice fields. Away from Ubud's incessant traffic, we lowered our voices. Now, Lilir told me, my education about Ubud's healing past could begin.

Lilir comes from a family of traditional Balinese healers. She and her husband, Westi, also a dukun, or healer, offer educational herb walks through the rice fields around Ubud, in Bali. They show people how to find traditional cures for many illnesses, treatments that are sometimes literally growing under foot.

When she was a girl, Lilir said, the rice fields stretched much further, but now the artist town of Ubud is becoming heavily built-up and the fields are fewer and fewer as families sell land to developers. What people don't realise, she said, is that as they lose their agricultural land, they are also losing their traditional medical heritage, and are forced to rely on Western medicine; an entire natural pharmacy grows wild in and around the sawahs.

Lilir stopped to show me the castor oil bean, touted as a new bio-fuel. Every day on TV there is a story about this plant, said Lilir, It can be grown across Indonesia, on dry land, arid land. But plantations of castor oil beans will cause land clearing and the loss of other species. Lilir worries that people will save a few plants because they are commercially valuable in the short term, but in the long term, lose biodiversity.

As we walked through the sawahs, from every direction came the 'click-clack-click-clack sound of bamboo wind wheels. Looking like mill wheels out of water, these fantastic creations hung in isolated trees across the fields. Lilir called the sound music for the gods. The corner of every rice field had a small shrine to Dewisita, the rice goddess. Farmers leave offerings to petition the goddess for a bountiful harvest. The black and gold cloths on the altars flapped in the breeze.

Lilir showed me plants used for shampoo, for soap, for dandruff, and even for putting a semi-permanent wave in hair. There were leaves for diarrhoea, ear infections, sore throats, dysentery, roots for haemorrhoids, Bali Belly and dyeing clothes, sap to stop bleeding, for cold sores and body odour,

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>