Leaves from the Calabash:: A Quest for Culture and Alternative Medicine - Tapa blanda

Leaves from the Calabash traces the path of Hawa in the tiny West African country of Rocontha. Since her birth, Hawa is trapped between the powerful forces of western influence and the magical powers of her culture and traditions as well as alternate medicine. Meanwhile, her country is in need of better leadership. Its inhabitants face many challenges, but things are starting to change.After proving herself in her early schooling, Hawa works briefly at a clinic, where her views about alternate medicine are strengthened and changed. She later gets a scholarship to study modern medicine in the USA. While abroad, Hawa faces the difficult challenges of raising two teenage girls caught up between the forces of peer pressure and the attachment for their traditions. Hawa is then offered a lucrative job, but her desire to help her people leads her back to Rocontha. There she opens a clinic that deals with alternate medicine, as well as several laboratories with the sole purpose of experimenting with the magical power of the African plant kingdom she believes will help propel alternate medicine into the mainstream of the health care system of her poor country.Through her life's work, her determination challenges the assumptions of women's place in society, as well as the colonial masters that African culture and alternate medicine have no place in modern civilization and medicine, because both are “magical” and lack scientific basis.