Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

Viento de descuido means Wind of Carelessness. After questioning
mothers, Panti traced infants’ problems to being left near a drafty window
in the early morning hours or taken outdoors at dusk with their heads or
bodies uncovered.
As usual, the afternoon transport arrived just as we finished lunch and
another discussion of Carla’s mal viento.
An attractive young woman in a miniskirt walked in, followed by a
square-framed, middle-aged man.
The young woman had traveled all the way from Guatemala City to see
Panti. Her brother had been abducted by the Guatemalan military a year
ago. Her family had never heard from him again. He had become one of
Guatemala’s many Desaparecidos.
She wanted to know if her brother was still alive.
“This is the work of the sastun,” Panti said as he guided her into the
cement house.
He sat at the table and she sat on the stool close to the door. He pulled
the little clay jar containing the sastun out of the Ovaltine can and asked the
boy’s name.
“Ricardo,” she said.
He turned the jar upside down into his left palm, and the sastun fell out.
He blew three times on the sastun and three times into the clay jar, then
placed the sastun back into the jar.
He twirled the jar with the sastun inside in circles. It made the clacking
sound I now knew well. As he twirled the jar, he sang a Mayan chant.
He dumped the sastun out of the jar into her right hand and instructed
her to hold it like a die and shake it.
After a few minutes, he directed her to the doorway where the light was
better. He opened her palm, poked at the sastun, and peered into it,
searching for the answer.
He motioned for me to come over and showed me with his finger a
number of tiny bubbles inside the translucent ball.
“There it is, there it is. Do you see it?” he said. I saw the bubbles, but it
was like a foreign language to me. Panti could see a meaning within those
bubbles that I couldn’t.
“The boy’s luck is good,” he said. “He is alive but far from home.”
“Can you bring him home?” asked his sister.
“Did you bring a photograph?” he asked.