Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

explaining that the old man was very busy, with patients trickling in all day
long and sometimes into the night.
“Are you sick?” she asked, looking me over for telltale signs of disease.
“You can wait in his kitchen. He should be back just before noon when the
patients start arriving by transport.”
The door to one of the thatch huts hung open, barely attached by a
broken hinge. I stepped inside and the coolness of the interior surprised me.
So did the state of disrepair. The walls displayed more stick than mud, and
more than half the adobe was chipped away.
The room was no more than ten by ten feet. Three chopping blocks sat
on the floor, surrounded by a dozen sacks of leaves, dried medicines, and
corn. I could see no modern conveniences. It could have been A.D. 800
except for the nearby cement house with its zinc roof.
I had lived in huts like this one in Mexico. Panti’s had a well-crafted
clay hearth, where a brazen hen ruffled her feathers in a cloud of ashes. An
enormous black pig grunted in the doorway and made a move to come
inside and rifle through a basket of dried corncobs. “Cuchi, cuchi,” I
shouted and rushed at him. The pig stared dead blank into my eyes and
shuffled away at his own pace.
“They respect no one and no place,” said a man in Spanish, stepping
into the hut with a woman and small child in tow. Once settled onto stools,
we exchanged the usual friendly greetings. “My baby is sick,” the woman
said as she tenderly stroked the child’s head. “She is four years old but as
you can see looks no more than two.”
The listless young girl looked up at me, igniting my healing instincts,
with her arm dropped askew, pathetically out of her control. She drooled a
bit and groaned, turning again to her mother for comfort. The child’s eyes
looked vacant and her breath was shallow. I could see her heart beating like
a trapped bird under her paper-thin, lavender dress.
The girl had been vomiting and suffering from diarrhea for months, the
mother said. They had taken her to clinics in Guatemala and in Mexico’s
Yucatán before running out of money.
“All the doctors say the same thing,” said the mother. “‘We see nothing
on the machines, so there’s nothing wrong with your child. She just needs
better food and vitamins.’” However, a nurse in Guatemala had suggested
they see the great healer, Don Elijio.