Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

He instructed her to boil a handful of the vine in three cups of water for
ten minutes and to drink one cup three times daily during menstruation for
nine months consecutively. This would prevent pregnancy for the rest of her
life, he assured her.
“You could sleep with your man six times a day in the bed, in the bath,
in the car, anywhere you like, and as many times as you like, and nothing
will take. Only groans of pleasure. Nothing else. Don’t worry. These things
are no mystery to me. It’s all up here in my head. Right here.”
Berta laughed vigorously, paid Don Elijio five dollars, and, clasping her
bag of Ki Bix against her breast, found a ride going toward town in a truck
overloaded with mahogany logs.
That evening, after all the patients had left, I asked him how the Ki Bix
worked. “Se secca el cuajo,” he explained. “It dries the membrane.” This
prevents implantation of the fertilized egg.
Treatment for one month would last for five months; two months of use
provided ten months of protection, he said. Women who took it for nine
months would become permanently sterile.
“No woman has ever come back to say she was pregnant,” Don Elijio
told me.
I asked him if he was sure. He answered, with his usual flippant humor,
“Hmmmm, Rosita, no babies named after me!”
I saw over time, however, that the Ki Bix or Cow’s Hoof didn’t, in
practice, seem to be 100 percent effective; implantations did occur. For
instance, the woman who lived in Cristo Rey Village two miles down river
from our farm requested the vine, then became pregnant in the third month
of the five-month protection period. An American woman from Wisconsin,
who had heard about Don Elijio through friends and was thrilled to have
some form of natural birth control, wrote me that she also got pregnant in
the third month. Still, many women reported that they didn’t conceive and
swore by the thorny vine.
When I mentioned that to Don Elijio, he said, “Sometimes they don’t
take it the way I tell them to. And sometimes, she secretly wants to be
pregnant.”
Ki Bix was only one of the many plants that Don Elijio favored in the
treatment of women’s ailments. Contribo vine was excellent for menstrual
complaints, especially if complicated by gastric problems. The bark of the
Copalchi Tree was used for diverse symptoms such as painful periods,