Feral Crust: Herbal Medicine Handbook Announce

Feral Crust is a community-based autonomous space in the slum area of Taguig, Philippines. Since March 2014, the space has been located on Mabato Road Brgy, a squatted public road near cement and other industrial factories. Next year, however, we plan to move to the outskirts of Davao City to set up a small permaculture land project, an anarchist infoshop, and a countryside social center, much closer to nature.

As part of our land project, we are putting together a handbook about natural healing for common illnesses using locally grown herbal remedies. We also want to include a political perspective and other vital information about do-it-yourself healing.

Some of our inspirations are radical and informative publications such as Rina Nissim’s Natural Healing in Gynecology: A Manual for Women, Erica Zelfand’s Yeast of Your Worries: A Yeast Infection Survival Handbook, and texts by Lisa on changes during the menstrual cycle, feminism and anatomy, the medical model of menstruation, and the politics of so-called PMS.

These important materials are quite rare here. We think it would be useful to publish something ourselves about reclaiming health and well-being, socially and ecologically. We want the handbook to provide information relevant to our local context, and we need support with printing and distribution.

If you think you can help, please get in touch using the contact below. We would be happy to make friends and build close, mutual connections that deepen solidarity across borders. We hope to circulate the handbook among friends in the city and countryside, our families and neighbors, autonomous activists, and our wider network of local infoshops and autonomous spaces.

Recently, we traveled to North Luzon, meeting friends in upland, lowland, and coastal areas. We visited remote places and met old and new friends in Indigenous communities, as well as farmers and fisherfolk. We wanted to learn more about ways of living directly connected to the land and efforts to maintain or regain autonomous subsistence.

We traveled for about a month, saw beautiful natural landscapes, and tried to understand each place’s political, cultural, ecological, and social situation. We made friends and new contacts in remote and isolated areas.

We also faced interrogation at checkpoints, including by military personnel fighting Maoist guerrilla insurgents known here as the New People’s Army. This happened even in places where there was no fighting. We couldn’t avoid being reported by snitches in rural communities either.

Some people, we assume, were shocked by our appearance, especially when we were stranded on the road waiting for a truck or car to take us to our next destination. We traveled by hitchhiking. In the end, we were OK once the authorities saw our IDs and camping gear and understood that we were just local tourists. We kept our answers honest and straightforward. We didn’t say much, just answered their questions directly.

A few weeks ago, we returned to our space. Now we’re back in the city, continuing work on the plant medicine handbook and filling in the information we need. We gathered useful material through conversations with rural people about plant medicine.

We want to publish the handbook and give it away to people from all walks of life, not just autonomous activists or those in the anarchist scene. We aim to finish it within one to two months. It will include local translations of texts on preparing herbal remedies, information about identified plants and their uses for specific illnesses, a brief political statement against the medical and pharmaceutical industries, and material on autonomous healing.

We’re looking forward to finishing the handbook. Onwards!

Contact: [email protected]