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This Herbalist Is Bridging The Healthcare Gap For Latine Farmworkers In Wine Country

BY CRISTINA GOYANES AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY CARLOS CHAVARRÍA

It’s 9 a.m. on a Friday in August, and a group of about 40 farmworkers have been hard at work for three hours in a Napa vineyard. The sky is hazy from a nearby wildfire, and the air quality clocks at 105— “unhealthy” for people with diabetes, heart, and lung disease. Jocelyn Boreta pulls in front of a barn at Silver Oak vineyard aboard her Botanical Bus filled with 100-plus dried herbs for formulating teas and a 70-herb tincture bar. She starts setting up for the day’s event: the largest bilingual health clinic she’s ever organized...

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Sonoma Activist Promotes Healing in Latine Community with Botanical Bus

BY NATE SELTENRICH, Sonoma Magazine

In response to Covid last spring, Boreta and her colleagues distributed 500 herbal care kits for immunity, stress relief, and respiratory health.

This year, they will continue their outreach with mobile health services for farmworkers at more than two dozen worksite clinics. The Botanical Bus also sponsors a promotora program, which engages community leaders to organize culturally relevant, bilingual wellness workshops...

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Delivering Food Security

BY KARY HESS, North Bay Bohemian

If we want to be a community ready for transformative change, we can begin making it happen by listening to what people actually need, and then responding. 

Sonoma County–based Daily Acts and The Botanical Bus: Bilingual Mobile Herb Clinic are doing just that. They have distributed over 1,000 garden kits in the past weeks to Latine community members experiencing food insecurity in Sonoma County...

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Why Sonoma is the only Bay Area county stuck in the strictest reopening tier

BY KELLIE HWANG, San Francisco Chronicle

California has achieved notable success corralling the coronavirus pandemic while cases have again surged nationwide. The Bay Area in particular is a standout, with eight of nine counties progressing to less-restrictive levels in the state’s four-tier reopening system.

The exception: Sonoma County, still stuck in the purple tier indicating “widespread” virus risk. It’s one of just 12 counties in California with that designation, which places tight restrictions on businesses and other activities

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Sonoma County struggles to get out of California’s purple tierv

BY ANDRE SENIOR, Fox KTVU Channel 2

SONOMA COUNTY, Calif. – Sonoma County is still struggling to get its COVID-19 infection rates down as it remains the last Bay Area county where the risk of infection remains widespread.

“The reasons are multifactorial. There’s a lot of factors that go into why we’re seeing what we’re seeing in terms of COVID-19,” said Sonoma County health officer Dr. Sundari Mase to the board of supervisors Wednesday…

The Latine community is also being hit-hard with up 54 percent of the county’s COVID cases and for community organizer Jocelyn Boreta, the reason is clear.

“Our community, our families, are adversely impacted because the choice of going to work or not going to work is not one that we have,” Boreta told KTVU...

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Botanical Bus Herb Clinic arrives soon

BY KARY HESS, North Bay Bohemian

Eighty-six-year-old Georgina Rivas grew up in the Peruvian countryside. Her mother’s pregnancy was difficult and Rivas owes her very life to herbal medicine.

Now, Rivas shares her lifelong herbal knowledge with her Sonoma County community. Another Sonoma County woman, also from Peru, struggles with intense anxiety. The deep herbal knowledge of her own ancestors has proven to be the right medicine for her.

These women are part of a growing community coordinated by the Botanical Bus Bilingual Mobile Herb Clinic...

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La Luz offers free workshops on how to make herbal remedies at home

BY ANNE WARD ERNST, Sonoma Index-Tribune

Passing around fresh sprigs of rosemary, Jocelyn Boreta tells a small group of women to draw the sprigs through a closed hand to release the herb’s oils, then inhale the aroma. The fragrance is stimulating and a good pick-me-up when a 3 p.m. nap sounds appealing, she said. In the kitchen of La Luz Center, Boreta is teaching the group how to use commonly found herbs – such as rosemary and sage – and spices in a medicinal manner for improved health in a series of workshops called “Recetas y Remedios” or Recipes and Remedies...

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Curanderas Rising

BY ESTEFANY GONZALES, Made Local Magazine

Guadalupe Vasquez used to go to the doctor’s office three times a month. Vasquez, 35, battles diabetes as well as liver and kidney problems. Her pain was so severe, she once fainted in the emergency room and had to be put on a morphine drip. Last February, fed up with feeling crummy, she joined the Farming for Health program at Bayer Farm—a six-acre urban garden and community park located in the heart of Sonoma County’s Roseland neighborhood—and has noticed a distinct improvement in her health...

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Latino Community Embraces Herbs for Healing

BY LEILANI CLARK, The Press Democrat

“The mission is all about empowering people to feel good in their bodies — and to create leaders who feel pride and value in their indigenous knowledge,” said Boreta, after the class comes to a close. “They know these plants and they know how to use them.”...

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