Jamu: The Ancient Indonesian Art of Herbal Healing. Susan-Jane Beers

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СКАЧАТЬ Javanese woman would understand that if she was born on Saturday Pahing 9, and the recipe called for twice that amount, she has to add 18 ingredients to a recipe. Conflicting with this is the superstition that ingredients must be of an odd number. Thus you may include one or three handfuls of an ingredient, or one or five cups of liquid, but never two. Some recipes for jamu furthermore require the preparation of the medicine by a girl who has yet to start menstruating—yet another hurdle.

      A CAUTIONARY TALE

      It is vital to follow instructions when mixing jamu. Barbara Johnson, an American who has lived in Jakarta for many years, discovered this at her own expense. Although Barbara has a fine figure she noticed the beginnings of cellulite on the back of her thighs. Mentioning this to an Indonesian friend, she was amazed when a pack of dried roots and herbs arrived at her house a few days later. “This is for the cellulite,” her friend said. “I’ve used it for years and it works wonders.”

      Barbara asked her maids, village girls with experience of jamu, to prepare the drink and promptly forgot about it. She later found a glass of black liquid in the fridge and, enquiring what it was, learned that it was her jamu. Naturally she was keen to see whether this foul-tasting brew was effective and drank it all down only to realize minutes later that she’d made a big mistake.

      Barbara was rushed to hospital, having burned her throat, oesophagus and intestines to such an extent that she couldn’t go home for six weeks. She says the only good part of this tale was the result. “When I looked in the mirror I discovered there was not one single ounce of cellulite anywhere on my body. The cure was incredible in more ways than one.”

      Why did this happen? Apparently Barbara had consumed about three weeks’ supply of jamu in one draught, because the girls had accidentally made the mixture far too strong.

      Other beliefs concern the need for additional ingredients for pregnant women. They are advised to include the powdered egg shells of newly-hatched, healthy chickens and carbonized mouse nests in their jamu. The egg shells are included in the hope that the baby will be equally healthy; they provide additional calcium while the carbon helps absorb toxins. The mouse nests were believed to make birthing as easy as that of a mouse.

      Jamu also features in Javanese wedding ceremonies in which the bride’s mother presents a newly married couple with a box or botekan containing various seeds, rhizomes and dried cuttings from traditional medicinal plants and spices. Traditionally, these should be used on the first day of marriage and, more importantly, be planted in the garden of the couple’s new home. This gesture is a mother’s last symbolic effort to provide a healthy life for her daughter.

      Old beliefs are not in short supply. Some believed that ingredients had to be ground in the home of the person drinking the jamu. However, if that person did not possess a grinding stone, the jamu maker had to decide whether it was appropriate to make the jamu in his or her own home before delivering it to the client. It was also considered part of the cure for the jamu maker to give the jamu directly to the recipient. If it was a paste, the maker would clean the grinding stone with her hands, and then rub a little of the mixture onto the patient’s skin. If the medicine was to be drunk, the jamu maker would put a little of the ground mixture into the glass of jamu with her fingers before the patient was allowed to take it.

      Government Regulations

      In the interests of safety, the government advises that only those brands of jamu carrying the Indonesian Food and Drug Control Directorate (the DepKes RI number) on the packet should be consumed. (DepKes is the acronym for the Departemen Kesehatan, the Department of Health and RI stands for Republic of Indonesia.) These registration numbers (issued also by the Departemen Kesehatan) must, by law, be printed on every bottle or packet. The number is issued only after the product has been tested by government laboratories and met a stringent set of requirements. If the name or formula of the jamu changes after registration the whole process must be repeated.

      The Department of Health regularly buys herbal medicine from retail outlets to verify that products are not sold after their expiry date and then submits these samples for testing by its team of pharmacists to ensure standards of quality control and storage conditions have been met. Some smaller producers, however, simply cannot afford to pay the DepKes registration fees but still make excellent jamu. In this instance a specialist jamu shop should be able to offer advice.

      The government now insists every jamu and herbal medicine company employs a qualified pharmacist (or assistant pharmacist) to ensure professional quality control. It has laid down that the word jamu and not obat (which means any type of medicine, either natural, as in jamu, or chemical) must be printed on packages of anything that has not been scientifically and clinically tested. In addition, manufacturers are not allowed to advertise that a certain illness can be cured by a specific manufactured jamu. An example of this policy concerns a Slimming Tea. Not only have customers successfully lost weight using this jamu, but it has been scientifically proven that it reduces cholesterol levels too. However, government regulations prevent manufacturers from publicizing this because the product is categorized as jamu, not obat.

      DepKes regulations stipulate pharmaceutical and medical terminology cannot be used to describe the use and effectiveness of jamu. Any claims on behalf of the product must be in simple, everyday language. Generally, an interval of at least one hour, if not four hours, should separate the consumption of more than one type of jamu.

      A Question of Authenticity

      As a general rule, it is better to stick with reputable brand names unless the person making up the medicine has been recommended as entirely trustworthy. There are extremely good healers who do not have the advantage of scientific staff and machinery, but one needs to be sure they really are experts. There are stories of manufacturers who have added a hefty dose of steroids to the concoction. The result may be effective in the short term but it certainly is not safe. A guarded approach is essential, because it is easy to pick someone who is a charlatan.

      Another area for concern is the proliferation of one type of night warung, small stalls that usually stay open all night in Indonesia. Illegal jamu is big business. The sellers are well known to locals in Bali or Yogyakarta and are occasionally found in Jakarta. As their products are illegal, these traders are expert at uprooting themselves and disappearing at the first sign of police. If undisturbed, they make an extremely good living and the benefits outweigh the risks. However, they sell an exceedingly strong jamu that can be highly dangerous. It is similar to a fermented wine or beer and is famous, according to Indonesians, for ‘making men strong’. It is one of the few jamu with side effects. If you notice a group of men reeling and singing around a night stall, chances are they have been working on their virility because the fermented drink makes customers exceedingly drunk. Foreigners do not have to worry about stumbling across these sellers because they would never let a Westerner buy their jamu. They are equally reluctant to sell to an Indonesian woman who arrives on her own, but will serve her if she is with her husband.

      There are also more or less legitimate sellers who think they can improve on original recipes. One such vendor in Menteng Dalam, North Jakarta has a reputation for selling exceedingly good jamu made using an electric blender; he attracts huge queues of regular customers in the morning rush hour. What is so unique about this jamu? The seller adds a Bodrex tablet (a trade name for paracetamol) to the blender with every glass of jamu even though it is illegal to mix jamu with chemical drugs. On its own, this is not such a bad thing as many Western doctors recommend a small dosage of paracetamol each day. The real problem is that good jamu is so carefully concocted that if it is tampered with, toxic chemical reactions are liable to occur.

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