Rosana Tositrakul talks about gathering traditional knowledge:
When we started this project, we'd just go to the villages and start to learn from people. And we take some herb and ask, each day, "Do you know, what is the name, and how do you use it?" And from that, we started to learn that people have a lot of knowledge, but they don't have confidence to use the herbal medicine.
Maybe at first they say, "Oh, I don't know." But when we stay a week in the village, one-by-one the villagers come to see us, and (they say), "I know what this is for!"
And we wonder we are surprised "Why do you know? A few days ago you said that you don't know at all about this." They say that, "Oh, I asked my grandfather, I asked my grandmother, I asked my father." And from that, we learned a lot from these people.
All this knowledge is from the people themselves. It is not from us at all. But it is like, we don't know anything and we would like to learn from them.
They try to write us a letter even (though) they cannot spell it correctly, but they would like to share the knowledge with you. And I found that if you can make people feel confident in themselves, I think that people would like to give something to you.
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