Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

that cure. I was sad when he left me alone at the block and went home for
lunch. Then, to my delight, Panti popped his head in the hut and invited me
to eat lunch with him. We sat at a table that was made from a crate, and his
great-grandchildren brought his food. I pulled out my homemade granola
and a thermos of apple juice.
As I chewed up my granola, he looked at me oddly. “What are you
eating, child, mash?” I burst out laughing. Mash was the local term for
chicken feed. I told him about granola and my vegetarian diet of fifteen
years.
He smiled approvingly. Factory food was ruining people’s diets, he
scolded. People were being afflicted with what he called “modern food
disease.” “Junk” or cuchinada (pigged) food was at the root of most of his
patients’ ailments, which he noticed were worsening in recent decades. He
said the intake of packaged foods—full of chemicals and preservatives—
had made people more vulnerable to high blood pressure, heart disease,
arthritis, diabetes, and cancer.
“For ‘modern food disease,’” he said, “I give Balsam bark tea to cleanse
the kidney and the liver, and many of these problems go away.”
He also found grave harm in frozen popsicles, known locally as ideals.
“Since people starting sucking on those horrible things, they started
with this ciro,” he said. Only since the advent of refrigeration had people
been able to drink cold drinks. “Too much cold makes the stomach cramp.
After a while it stays in a knot, and one bite of food fills it up. Then when I
massage the stomach, it has a giant pulse, it feels like a rabbit, but it is only
ciro. If you take ciro to a doctor, he will shout, ‘Hernia, hernia! Get the
knife, we must operate!’ But what can they take out, when it is just pure
wind?”
I said I thought it was a shame that medicinal plants such as Man Vine
that he used to treat ciro were being forsaken. I found this especially sad
since modern medicine had found no better way to treat gastritis.
As I spoke, Panti chewed with toothless gums on the ancient regional
diet of corn tortillas, beans, and hot chocolate. He said he abhorred the
Belizean favorite: rice and beans. And he didn’t eat much of the other
staples his neighbors favored, such as lard and pig tails.
Until very recently, most villagers had backyard gardens where they
grew Chaya, Chayote, Cilantro, and some wild greens including Amaranth.
Like Chinda had, they used to make salsa from fresh tomatoes, chilies, and