Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

CHAPTER TWENTY
Wild Coffee Café Sylvestre Eremuil
Malmea depressa
The aromatic leaves of the small tree are considered to be the most important of all the medicinal
leaves used in Maya medicine. Traditional healers use the leaves, boiled in water, to bathe patients
suffering from any sickness. A steam bath of the leaves is used to treat muscle spasms, rheumatism,
arthritis, paralysis, swelling, backache, and fever.
It was a delightfully cool, sunny winter afternoon in late December when a
truck pulled into the driveway of Ix Chel Farm. Rolando, our employee,
came to get me in the garden where I was laboring over a bed of collard
transplants and daydreaming about the salads and pots of delicious boiled
greens I hoped we would be eating in a few months.
“There’s a man here to see you, Doña Rosita,” Rolando said softly, so as
not to startle me out of my reverie.
“Did he say what he wants?” I asked, reluctant to leave my garden,
thinking I might never finish the transplanting.
“He said he has brought a sick child.”
“Ask him to wait on the veranda, get him a drink of water, and tell him
I’ll be right there as soon as I wash my hands,” I said.
A couple in their midthirties sat in chairs on the open-air, thatch roof
porch that Greg had just built. The woman held a girl, about eight years old,
in her arms. She seemed stiff as a board sitting in her mother’s lap. Her
outstretched legs were oddly askew. I braced myself for the story.
“Good afternoon,” I said. “I am Rosita. What can I do for you?”
As the man introduced himself, I recognized him as the manager of the
hardware store in Santa Elena, the town just across the Hawkes-worth
Bridge from San Ignacio.
“We’ve come to see you because our daughter is very ill,” he said,
“gravely ill, and no doctor has been able to help her. She hasn’t been able to
move her legs or walk for more than three weeks now. The doctors sent us
home saying they didn’t know what the problem was and had no treatments