Mencha’ has been and is a true salvation for many residents of La Guancha. She always knows which plant is best for a bad stomach, for insomnia, and the best one to help expel kidney stones.
The garden of his house is a true natural pharmacy in which huge orchids of different colors coexist with pots with different species of herbs, some almost unknown, with which he prepares his “healing waters.”
In reality, her name is Eulalia Luis Domínguez but no one in her town knows her by that name, given “inheritance” by her godmother who had the same name. For her neighbors, she is simply Mencha, who many mothers go to because her babies don’t sleep well or cry a lot.
He asks them for a piece of clothing, visualizes the little one and crosses him. “Do you think he took it away?” They confirm the next day.
His youth was hard because he was born in the post-war period. Like most families of that time, he lacked clothing and food. And even more so since it is made up of seven children, three boys and four girls. She and her twin brother Juan were the youngest. “No one touched me,” she says, because he always protected her from her.
Mencha is a native of the La Florida neighborhood, in Icod de los Vinos, on the border with La Guancha, where her husband lived, with whom she had four children, two boys and two girls.
He went to primary school but stayed for a short time because his family had to work. His parents farmed the farm of a man who also owned an ice cream shop and with whom he worked for a long time. Years later, he was best man at her wedding.
He also went to the mountains looking for pine needles but it was not there where he learned the properties of each plant. “That comes to you,” he says.
He assimilated many things from the book that a woman gave him who he healed from a sunburn on the middle of her face. He felt bad and went to the doctor, but he didn’t have a solution and someone told him that ‘Doña Mencha’ knew how to do it and he went to her without hesitation.
It took several days, because to get the sun the days have to be odd and he managed to get it off.
Since he did not want to charge her – because he has never done so – the lady gave him a book that she had bought on Mount Teide that contains “everything.” She heard other secrets from people’s stories or she discovered them little by little, since she always liked to ask.
‘Mencha’ explains the properties of each herb one by one. Lemon balm, for example, is very good for the blood, it cuts fear, cold, bad eyes and shingles. “Cutting shingles is simple, it is picking up a bush, asking what is wrong with cutting it, and then comes the prayer. When he finishes, he offers it to the saint to whom he has the most devotion.” In this case, the plant he prefers is nightshade and the saints he chooses are the Virgin of Health and Christ of the Column.
Then there is another “herbit” known as “tabaibilla”, which when broken, releases a kind of white milk. “That is used to cure warts, you put a few drops, leave it for a while and they disappear.”
Celandine is very good for pityriasis alba, a type of eczema popularly known as instep.
She believes that many times “a natural remedy is better than a medicine, and also to believe. If you believe, there is nothing difficult to cure,” she maintains. In fact, she doesn’t remember if there was anyone she couldn’t help.
It is known because it has “resurrected” even plants, which also give the evil eye. “The plant dries up and if you know the name of the plant, you call it by its name, and if you don’t know, you call it a plant. The prayer is very similar to that of people,” she points out.
Once a “half-wise” man told her that her prayers were worth more because she was a twin “and had the strength of two.” She can’t confirm it.
The same skills he has for healing with herbs he has for writing. One day she was on the roof, she saw that the sun was shining on the snow-covered Teide “and that it looked like glass”, and she said to herself: “How beautiful it is”, and she wrote a poem to it. It was the first and he keeps it framed.
Her sisters always said proverbs and she always liked them, as did jokes: “I have loose writings and things from my mother that I learned, who was not a poet but she really liked singing.” Her father too, but he made them up. There was a boy who wanted her older sister and he recited: “There is a fool in the party who doesn’t know who he is, a lover lost in love giving fat to his feet.”
She proudly shows a box full of papers and notebooks written in her own handwriting. “I’ve been losing my memory a little, so I write down everything that comes to mind,” she adds.
She is aware that she has many spelling mistakes because “in those days,” it was enough to just know the letters and write her name. Fortunately, she has her granddaughters who “give her a hand” in this task.
After 60 years of age he graduated from school. “I had that thorn in me,” he confesses. She did it “on the run,” because she had to take care of the house, her children, and help her husband who had a butcher shop, “but I found the time.” After the pandemic, she had to have surgery on both knees and she already left it.
Since its foundation, she has participated in the Association of Universe Canary Poets, a cultural movement, born in 1983, that always collaborates with the La Guancha festivities in honor of the Virgin of El Rosario, of whom she has been a devotee since she was very young.
She also made her first steps in the theater together with ‘Nina’, a friend who has since passed away and with whom she formed a special duo. “She was my father and I was the daughter, we went to a lot of places. We didn’t earn anything, just have fun, and at most, they gave us a meal. Once we performed in Icod and since Nina and I had to take off the paint, it took us longer and they didn’t leave us food,” she says with a smile.
He even worked twice on Calero’s rooftop, the legendary TVE program in which the journalist and presenter Juan Luis Calero went up to the terrace of any neighborhood, town or city in the Canary Islands to tell stories about the protagonists of the place.
Mencha excelled on two occasions with his jokes and anecdotes. Those who know her claim that when she goes to the hairdresser she entertains the clients with her jokes.
He will turn 83 on February 12 and retains his mischief and good humor. When asked about the characters she played, she answers: “bossy,” and laughs.
He wrote a poem to an English teacher he had at adult school; to the Guanchera woman, “she is short but pretty”; to the Virgin of the Rosary, whom she has as an example; and she dared with the flood that devastated Santa Cruz de Tenerife in March 2022.
The COVID 19 pandemic did not stop me from continuing to do so, quite the opposite. Of course, he has not yet found the herb that cures the coronavirus or helps mitigate its consequences.
