Conquering suspected cervical cancer…
Cosbert gives NAREI’s CEO one of her teas to sample
Cosbert gives NAREI’s CEO one of her teas to sample

How one woman is using her herbal remedy to help others

THREE years ago, 32-year-old Princess Cosbert – a healthy and energetic cosmetologist became ill. Her hair started falling and she became thin. Within a matter of weeks, her health deteriorated rapidly. She became so ill that someone had to bathe and feed her.
It was finally time to visit the doctor and put a name to her illness. Though she was somewhat nervous—she wasn’t expecting the worst. After an examination and hours of waiting, the mother of one was told what no one wants to hear—she might have cervical cancer.
Refusing to accept this news, the once bouncy woman went to a few other doctors to get other opinions but they all said the same thing!
All the doctors recommended a biopsy to confirm whether or not she had cervical cancer—since she was showing all the symptoms.

“I refused to do the test because I only heard I might have cancer and I was so worried and scared so if they confirmed it, I know I would be worst off,” Cosbert recalled.
Having lived with a herbalist dad, the mother of one said she went home and called her father and explained to him what was happening to her. “He told me to make some things and drink it and I started with garlic tea.”

Determination

As the days went by, Cosbert, who was determined to see her only son off to university, said with her father’s help, she lived on Guyana’s natural herbs for months to come. “I followed my father’s recipe to the strictest. I ate what he told me to eat and I drank what he said I should.”

Some of Cosbert’s teas

Some of the natural remedies she used include: Moringa, Tulsi, lemon leaves, teasam and garlic. “After I use these things I notice I started feeling better and when I felt like my old self again, I went and I did the test,” she said.
The 32-year-old woman said when she finally got the test results, she jumped for joy when the doctors told her she did not have cervical cancer.
“I was a cosmetologist but that moment when I heard I didn’t have cancer, right away I wanted to help other persons beat cancer. While I am not sure I had cancer, all the doctors told me it was suspected cancer and they all seemed convinced it was cancer,” she said.

Second chance at life

Having had such a close encounter with cancer, Cosbert has now turned her experience into a small business to help other persons. She runs a small herbal business and sells herbal tea, health bars and herbal supplements.
The mother of one said she started making herbal tea after a friend tasted it and recommended that she added it to her line of other herbal products. It has been a year now since she introduced the tea and the response has been overwhelming.
“I would normally mix everything and put it in a cloth and then put it in the pot to boil and when my friend tasted it, she enjoyed it so another day, I took a Lipton tea bag, threw out the content, put my own mixture and sealed it back—and the tea was lovely,” Cosbert said.
Since then, she has not stopped making the herbal tea. She also makes Soursop tea. Her products, packaged under “Nature’s Finest” are available in supermarkets throughout the country, including, Nigel’s, Survival, Andrews and Real Value supermarkets, and the Guyana Marketing Corporation (GMC).

Cosbert displayed her products at the recent Regional Agricultural and Commercial Exhibition held at the Lusignan Centre Ground, East Coast Demerara (ECD).
There she met with the National Agricultural Research and Extension Institute (NAREI)’s Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Oudho Homenauth and explained some of the challenges she experiences in making her products.
For one, she said that while there is a market for the tea, she is in need of a processing machine but the investment is too high. Because she does everything manually, she recently lost a market in the United Kingdom.

“The customer wanted 3,000 boxes of the teas every month but I cannot supply him,” she said. Dr. Homenauth offered to help her grind some of her products at NAREI’s Mon Repos office.
Over the years, NAREI has been promoting the usage of traditional remedies, including moringa, soursop and ginger among others, for treatment. These plants have healing properties.

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