Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

“They don’t understand,” he said. “It is their own faith that heals them,
not the evangelist preacher.”
It didn’t take much to become an evangelist preacher. This was part of
the appeal of the movement. After a few months, any man or woman could
become a preacher. By contrast, it required years of training, as well as a
vow of celibacy, to be a Catholic priest. And as I was learning firsthand, it
wasn’t any easier to study to become a H’men.
The evangelical movement was one of the major reasons why so few of
the younger generation learned the old Maya ways. Many members of Don
Elijio’s family had converted to Evangelism over the years, and those who
had could barely tolerate their family patriarch.
He was inconsolable. “They’ve forgotten me,” he wailed again and
again. I gave him the gift that I had brought with me—a bottle of
wintergreen oil. I told him I loved him and would always be at his side. I
gave him a treatment, rubbing the oil into his sore muscles.
After the treatment he cheered up a bit, but I was still concerned. He
needed his patients—as much, surely, as they needed him. His patients were
his family, his companions, his audience, and his reason for being. Without
them, he was devoid of purpose and direction and mourned for Chinda
more than usual. The energy they gave him explained why he could treat as
many as thirty patients in a day and at the end of the arduous
administrations feel better than before.
It was the same for me. In my healing work, I too noticed that if ever I
began a treatment or consultation feeling tired or drained, I was always
renewed and strengthened afterward. I knew this was God’s gift to the
healer—that your patients strengthen and heal you as well as the reverse.
We sat alone chopping plants in the late morning. To cheer him up I told
him that I’d been approached by the producers of Belize All Over, a new
local television program. They wanted to make a documentary about him
and his work, which would be the first in a series about life in Belize.
Now, at ninety-two, Don Elijio had never seen television and had no
idea what a documentary was. I explained as best I could. Television had
only come to Belize in the late 1970s, and since San Antonio still didn’t
have electricity, television was not a part of daily life. I told him I thought
the documentary was important so that future generations of Belizeans
would know him, what he looked like, and how one man who never went to
school had become more sought after than a government minister.