3 December 2024
With winter bugs and viruses in mind, our fab project manager Bella Hoogeveen has collected cold and flu remedies offered by participants at the UNESCO RIELA Online Spring School back in October for the third day of RIELA advent. Bella (along with other members of the RIELA team) was battling a nasty cold to make the Online Spring School happen, and the Zoom chats were flooded with messages of care throughout the week in response. We hope some of these remedies might help if you have a dose of the sniffles this month!
Thank you to our wonderfully kind Spring School community for your contributions. The call for contributions for the UNESCO RIELA Spring School 2025: The Arts of Integrating (May Peace Prevail) is out now - we would love to hear from you!
Elderberry cordial - pick lots of free elderberries; boil with lots of syrup or honey or sugar and spices. Keep in fridge and drink with hot water.
My Italian grandfather would fill a jar of runny honey with as much raw garlic as would fit, then leave it and eat the garlic-honey when he had colds
Also he would eat raw onions!
My Scottish side is all about hot toddies
Jaegermeister is my cough syrup
Pine syrup. Pick pine needles, fill a glass jar (old jam jar). Then fill jar with sugar. Put in a cupboard for about 6 months and forget about it. Then Tada - pine syrup. Also do same with rosehips - which are in season just now. Raw Rosehip Syrup is amazing and packed with vitamin c.
Black Spanish Radish, you have to turn it into a cup prick the end put raw honey inside put it on a bowl/cup so that the honey could drip down.
we also take a spoonful of carob syrup
And my ETN doctor (since I was child) tells me to take hot baths and have a humidifier apparently coughing eases with steam
Afternoon Bella, I hope you feel better and better by cat power. Buckwheat tea with roasted pine nuts also works for me as a treat and treatment for cold.
gargling salt in tepid water for sore throats!
Oranges
tumeric, ginger, lemons and oranges in a high speed blender-- miracle cure!
I swear by a flu bomb for most viral ailments
Eritrea remedy: Half a cup of honey (preferably wild) and half a cup of warm milk.
Onions onions onions
Boil onions with garlic, ginger, turmeric and make broth. Its magical,
I make ‘cold tea’ by drying mint and lime flowers (from lime tree) through the spring. It’s really good.
Elderberry jelly for colds
For Bella, Tawona, and Hyab, a cup of hot black sugar ginger tea and a grilled orange or a boiled pear is healing and delicious! Hope you feel better soon.
It is also important to get Vitamin D with K as well as Vit-C - to boost the immune system. Another remedy I use is Pelargonium Sidoides extract - a kind of geranium
A friend told me that when you boil dry figs with milk - simmer for a while then blend it