Susan-Jane Beers spreads gospel of 'jamu'

By David Eyerly

JAKARTA (JP): Susan-Jane Beers was hurting.

Newly arrived in Jakarta with her English husband and finding herself inactive, she joined an aerobics class at a gym to take off the extra pounds.

The pounding of the exercise took its toll on her feet and knees and, as she says, "bits started falling off".

She turned to painkillers despite her natural aversion to pharmaceuticals, but they failed to completely take away the pain.

Then, as fate would have it, she went to a salon to get her hair done and a display of jamu, Indonesia's traditional herbal medicine, caught her eye.

After several months in the country, she was aware of jamu, having seen women selling the medicine around the neighborhood, but, like most westerners, she did not really know what the medicine could do.

But, as she says, "If it works for the Indonesians why not give it a go."

She described her ailments to the woman at the jamu counter in the salon, and two days later her medicine arrived in the form of two small bottles filled with pills.

Two days later her pain was gone and Beers was a jamu convert, feeling like she had struck upon "the magic bullet of all time".

Thus, from a pain in the knee came the inspiration for Beers' book Jamu: The Ancient Indonesian Art of Herbal Healing, one of the first English-language books on jamu.

That was in 1990. Today, the 53-year-old Irish-born Beers fairly glows with health. Her smooth skin belies her age and she has the slim figure most people lose, despite their best efforts, in their 30s and 40s.

If the jamu industry were looking for a spokeswoman to spread the gospel of the benefits of the herbal medicine to the English- speaking world, Beers would not be a bad choice.

Much of the 11 years between her "discovery" of jamu and the release of her book was spent by Beers researching the subject, meeting with jamu makers and experts on the subject to glean their knowledge in order to share it with other English speakers who may be unaware of or intimidated by this traditional herbal medicine.

Though she gathered information on traditional medicines from different parts of the country the focus of her work was in Java.

"I talked to a lot of people from various parts of the country. According to the Ministry of Health, they felt most of the information would be available in Java, even if it was from other parts of the country.

"What they were actually saying was that the Javanese traditional medicine of the jamu has really got a combination of all the others within it and reached a pretty high level of sophistication. So if you cover that in depth, you've got most of the elements of the other traditions."

Her research was interrupted by an unexpected move to Singapore in 1993, but Beers was undeterred. "I would have to save up enough money doing freelance journalism in Singapore to pay to come back here."

Nor was she deterred by the initial reluctance on the part of many people to discuss with her what they saw as their guarded family secrets. And she wasn't helped by the fact that her research coincided with the Ministry of Health saying there were foreigners coming into Indonesia trying to steal jamu secrets.

"Everywhere I went they said 'Maaf, pribadi' ("Sorry, it's private), 'Saya tidak tahu' ("I don't know"), so it went on and on. So I then went back to the Ministry of Health ... and they very kindly wrote me a reference saying 'She's not the person we were referring to in our directive and yes you can talk to her' and things got a bit easier after that.

"But because of the philosophy and the mysticism and everything else connected with jamu, people were still very reluctant to talk ... and once one person felt that I was going to be reasonably reliable and honest quite a few others opened up."

The result of Beers' determination is a book for a foreign community interested in jamu.

"This book was really conceived for non-Indonesians ... My research became a mission of zeal, I mean it was I'm going to convert the whole world to jamu, because the expense of health care overseas now and health insurance is so appalling, so I think people really have to learn to be responsible for their own health care. Jamu is prevention."