Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

orn and lay swaddled in the arms of a frightened ten-year-old boy. Their
mother lay prone on a mattress of cloth rags, her uterus protruding from the
birth canal. There it lay, he explained, like a pink balloon between her legs.
“I scolded the midwife for making the woman push too long and too
hard,” he said. He called for someone to make a fire in the middle of the
dirt floor. He took out a bottle of olive oil and a small clay bowl from the
purse, then warmed the oil in the bowl over the coals. He poured the oil
over his hands and rubbed some onto the dislodged uterus.
Gently and slowly, whispering his Mayan prayers to Ix Chel, Goddess
of childbirth, he gradually set the uterus back inside the pelvic cavity. “I
heard it pop as it went back into position,” he said.
He asked for clean sterile cloths, which he pushed into her vagina to
hold the uterus in place. Then he tied the faja around her pelvis to hold in
her overstretched ligaments and gave her the baby to nurse, knowing that
nipple stimulation contracts the uterus. An hour later, he removed the cloths
and allowed the postpartum fluids to flow freely.
The woman recovered completely. “That was my twenty-seventh
godchild,” he said proudly. “Her name is Gomercinda. They call her
Chinda.”