WEST INDIES: Village Woman Hits a 100

She has yardfowl eggs, boiled barley, but no macaroni BARBADOS, WEST INDIES (The Daily Nation), August 22, 2004: She celebrated her 100th birthday dancing through streets of Licorish Village, Barbados, West Indies on Wednesday, August 18. For years, Amy King has concocted home-made remedies – an aphrodisiac for a certain politician, bush tea for the cold and a little castor oil to clean “the constitution”. The only ailment for which Amy hasn’t yet come up with a remedy is cataract. That’s the only illness which plagues Amy King’s body at 100. No wonder then that for years for miles around, Amy has been known the “Medicine Woman”. Amazing Amy still ventures out all day, almost every day to find the right type of “bush” for her bush tea, as well as the correct ingredients for her famous pepper sauce. There is a “science” to choosing the correct bush – one mistake could make you sick. But King is a veteran by now. She rattles on names of various medicinal plants along with the ailments they are supposed to cure. Amy says this knowledge was passed on to her by her “foreparents”. But while Amy could sell her remedies for profit, she refuses to do so. “I don’t sell to anybody; I give it away. I’m accustomed boiling the bush tea for friends and family, I do not sell it. As the old people used to say, ‘Don’t do everything for money, do it for thanks,’” she explains. Amy King attributes her longevity to hard work, good genes and eating right. Her mother lived to the ripe old age of 105. She said she loaded canes and “carried dung” in her younger days and as for the diet, well she doesn’t mince words. “Boil barley and drink it and eat the backyard fowl eggs. We eat the old time food. We don’t eat macaroni and that foolishness, the old people weren’t for that,” advised Amy King who added: “I glad enough for my old age.” Based on “Remedy for a Century” By Melissa Wickham The Daily Nation, Barbados