Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

est fulfill those parting words of my dear maestro?” I was raised in the
inner city of Chicago in the 1940s and remembered that the best parts of my
childhood were the summer camps held by the Chicago Boys Club. We
nature-starved urban kids were taken out into the countryside of Michigan
and Wisconsin for two weeks every summer. There I fell in love with trees,
lakes, and big skies. I reasoned that if summer camp was so inspirational to
me, it might also be for the children of Belize. Greg and I hit on the idea of
creating the Summer Children’s Bush Medicine Camp in honor of Don
Elijio, and with the generous support of the Gildea Family Foundation, we
have run the camp for the past thirteen years. Twenty-four Belizean children
spend two weeks learning about medicinal plants with plenty of hands-on
activity. They learn how to treat earaches with oregano, headaches with
nopal, anemia with hibiscus flowers. They give each other spiritual baths to
combat susto, or fright. And amid all that learning, they sing, dance, swim
in the Macal River, and put on a talent show for parents’ day. Thus far,
more than three hundred children have attended Bush Medicine Camp, and
we know from parents’ reports that they indeed did learn “to help each
other.”
The New York Times published an obituary of Don Elijio on February
10, 1996, with the headline “Eligio Panti, 103, Maya Healer With Modern
Ties.” It began, “Eligio Panti, a traditional healer whose ancient herbal
remedies attracted the attention of modern medical scientists and drew
thousands of patients to the door of his humble hut in Belize, died on
Sunday in his home in the village of San Antonio.” The obituary went on to
add that “Don Eligio was schooled in a thousand-year-old oral tradition,
learning what many generations of botanical trial and error had taught his
predecessors: which obscure plant would cure which ailment and how to
prepare each cure.”
This epilogue is written during the great year of 2012, the year that the
Maya calendar ends and begins again. It is not, as some have said, the end
of the world; only a new beginning. Let it be a beginning of an era in which
we learn to live in greater harmony with the gifts of the earth and its
indigenous peoples.