Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Chicoloro
Strychnos panamensis
Considered one of the primary medicines in Maya healing.
The woody vine is chopped and boiled as a tea to be drunk for gastric conditions, uterine problems,
poisoning, and constipation. The active principle, strychnine, is toxic when taken in excess. The cross
pattern on the branches is considered a warning that the plant is medicinal but toxic and must be
consumed with caution.
A beautiful Maya woman from Corozal District up north showed up at the
clinic one day because she wished to stop a seemingly endless progression
of children.
The woman, Berta, told us she was thirty-eight and the mother of
fourteen children and the grandmother of six. “Too many,” she told us with
a lovely, gold-toothed smile. Despite the work of bearing and raising such a
brood, her dark skin radiated health and her ebony eyes glowed brightly
beneath a forehead that sloped back into a thick, black braid.
She was one of those strong Central American women whom I so much
admired: contented, conversant, in charge. She conjured up an image of the
wise woman at her helm of the family ship. I could picture her handscrubbing
clothes for twenty people, grinding corn, working in the fields,
cooking over an open hearth, nursing babies, attending to her husband—all
with grace and laughter.
What Berta wanted was a natural birth control method, she explained to
Don Elijio. It was possible, at her age, that she could still bear five or six
more children.
“I love my husband and family very much,” she explained. “But
fourteen children is enough, I tell him. He doesn’t want me to use any pills,
so he told me to come to see you to seek your help for something natural.”
Don Elijio laughed and grinned his usual jolly, toothless grin. “I fix
those who want and those who don’t want,” he said simply, repeating the
line he said so often. He was very comfortable with discussing birth control,
as women made up a large portion of his patient load and troubled and