Living with ADHD

Mental Health Challenges

• Luna, an individual, is struggling with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).
• Due to ADHD, Luna experiences fatigue, making it difficult to perform even simple tasks.
• Lack of access to therapy and support from parents exacerbates Luna's mental health challenges.
• Social and emotional support, including sympathy from parents, is essential for individuals with ADHD, but Luna is not receiving it.

The Coconut Palm

• For millennia, the coconut has been central to the lives of Polynesian and Asian peoples.
• In the western world, coconuts have always been exotic and unusual, sometimes rare.

Physical Characteristics

• The coconut palm has a smooth, slender, grey trunk, up to 30 meters tall.
• The trunk is surmounted by a rosette of leaves, each of which may be up to six meters long.
• The leaves have hard veins in their centers which are used as brushes after the green part of the leaf has been stripped away.

Coconut Fruits

• Coconut palms produce as many as seventy fruits per year, weighing more than a kilogram each.
• The wall of the fruit has three layers: a waterproof outer layer, a fibrous middle layer, and a hard, inner layer.
• The fibrous middle layer produces coconut fiber, ‘coir’, which has numerous uses and is particularly important in manufacturing ropes.

Uses of Coconut

• The woody innermost layer, the shell, with its three prominent ‘eyes’, surrounds the seed and is used to produce charcoal, which is widely used in various industries as well as in the home as a cooking fuel.
• The shells are also used as bowls in many parts of Asia.
• Coconut water is enjoyed as a drink and provides the hormones that encourage other plants to grow more rapidly and produce higher yields.
• Dried coconut flesh, ‘copra’, is made into coconut oil and coconut milk, which are widely used in cooking in different parts of the world, as well as in cosmetics.

Biology and Distribution

• Coconut seeds are able to float in water and tolerate salt, but cannot remain viable indefinitely; they are no longer able to germinate after about 110 days at sea.
• Coconut seeds can germinate and root on desert island shores with little more than sand to grow in and exposed to the full glare of the tropical sun.
• The air pocket in the seed, created as the endosperm solidifies, protects the embryo.
• The fibrous fruit wall that helped it to float during the voyage stores moisture that can be taken up by the roots of the coconut seedling as it starts to grow.

History of Coconut Distribution

• There were no coconut palms in West Africa, the Caribbean, or the east coast of the Americas before the voyages of the European explorers Vasco da Gama and Columbus in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.
• 16th-century trade and colonization introduced coconuts to these regions.