YOu are me & I am you

At a young age in the wake of the devastating loss of her own baby during childbirth and having seen friends suffering similarly, Carmen Cumba decided to learn the ancient ritual of Pakarina (child birth) to prevent more mothers and children from dying unnecessarily during the birthing process.

Carmen spent years apprenticing and studying the ways of the Partera’s (midwives) and also those of Yachak’s (shamen) learning as much as she could about plant medicine even though she could not read or write. Through a thirsty curiosity, stubbornness, tirelss dedication and a lot of hard work she now has one of the largest organic medicinal plant gardens in the Andes that serves as her pharmacy where she, much like a pharmacist, expertly gathers all the right ingredients straight out of the ground to create medicine to treat her patients. She turns no one away. People have been known to travel hours to consult her for health issues they cannot seem to remedy through other means.

Carmen is now considered an authority on plant medicine locally and regionally. Even the Red Cross has consulted her. She wants to share her knowledge before it is lost as fewer and fewer youth in her community are interested in learning this ancient knowledge, instead choosing to pursue higher education to earn more money. She believes that if more people understand how natural medicine works, it will become normalized as a part of overall health practices. Carmen and her fellow partera’s share their knowledge through seminars, training programs, tourism and even a few published books even though she and most of her colleagues cannot read or write.

For decades, Carmen and her fellow Parteras and Yachaks have been treated with skepticism and often a total lack of respect by Western medicine.  While this is starting to change as the Ecuadorian Health Ministry has started to work with the indigenous medicine community, there is still a gap in how they are treated and compensated. Carmen has become a leading advocate for helping to bring fair treatment to her fellow midwives and healers in the hospitals and medical community where they typically do not get paid for their time, skills, knowledge or services.

Carmen believes that both Natural and Western medicine should be used appropriately and in tandem.

We asked Carmen on our last day with her back in January of 2019 what she hopes and longs for in her life. She expressed that she wants to share her knowledge with the world. She said she dreams of building a place where scientists and doctors both indigenous and western can come together to share and teach each other what they know, what they’ve learned and what they imagine to be possible. This project is in part about helping these dreams become her reality.

This is the story of Carmen Cumba.

We are proud to be a 3 time recipient of the CORE Grant from the City of Austin which gave us seed money to get started. The Motion Media Arts Center/ Austin School of Film is a full sponsorship partner. In May of 2020 we decided to move forward with making a short film out of the footage we captured in 2019 as the Covid Virus caused us to scrap our plans to keep filming and make a feature.