Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

watched them tirelessly mobilize the chips of green leaves—heavy loads for
their tiny frames. I found that I couldn’t wait to see the old man again.
I loped up the last hill to San Antonio. The distinctly pungent stench of
pigs and rotting cornhusks greeted me as I walked the last quarter mile to
Panti’s compound.
He was at home, sitting on the kitchen floor, vigorously chopping
medicine. He was chatting with the mother of the sick child, whom I had
met the month before.
“Buenos días,” I said, as I came through the door. The woman
introduced herself to me. Her name was Juanita, her daughter, María. “Yo
soy Rosita,” I said. They were camped out on the floor, and Maria was
asleep on an old door, without a mattress or pillow.
In the Maya tradition, it’s customary for healers to house their patients,
since many are far from home and too poor to pay for room and board. By
the time they had found Don Elijio, María’s family had spent their savings
on medicines, hospital stays, and taxicabs.
Panti didn’t even glance up at me. He said a polite hello, then continued
chopping. He didn’t seem to notice or care that Juanita was at the moment
straining to pull one of the wooden poles of the wall of his hut off its
bracing to add to the fire. Already, more than half the wall was gone,
leaving a large, gaping space. At this rate, the rest of the walls would burn
up in a few weeks.
Juanita sensed my astonishment. “Too much rain this week,” she
explained meekly, as she stood surrounded by buckets and pots that had
been called into service to catch the rain pouring in through the holes in the
roof. “The wood is all wet and we must have a fire to warm Maria and cook
our food.”
“I built this house fifty years ago,” Panti chimed in. “My wife and I
lived here like two kittens on a pillow. Now the roof is rotten but those
corner poles! They would outlive you and I both. They are of Escoba, a
palm that doesn’t even know how to rot. But this house is beyond saving.
And when it is all gone, God will help me build another one.”
When his wife had been alive, he explained, she had tended to patients,
feeding them fresh beans, pumpkins, and homemade tortillas. She had
always made sure the hut was snug and warm. Although he did his best, it
could never be the same.