Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

garlic, and they drank a refreshing liquid made from orange leaves, Lemon
Grass, and Allspice berries, providing them with vitamin C and minerals.
Now they preferred to drink Coca-Cola.
“Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food,” I
quipped, quoting Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine. As a healer, I
told him I encouraged the use of foods called “pot” herbs—plants we eat
that also cure us, such as Rosemary, Amaranth, and Basil, which have
medicinal power in their organic states.
I never wanted our conversation to end. We both looked out the window
when we heard the afternoon transport rumble in, with Angel behind the
wheel. His wife and several of their nine children were crowded next to him
in the cab. Upwards of twenty people sat on wooden boards in the back of
the canvas-covered truck amid farm supplies, chickens, and buckets.
That afternoon I was called into the cement house on several occasions
to translate for patients who spoke only English. It was the first time I had
ever been invited to help as Panti worked with his patients.
An eighteen-year-old San Ignacio woman, four months pregnant and
paralyzed from the waist down, was one of the first patients. Two years
before, she had had a very difficult delivery, and after the birth she had lost
the use of her lower limbs. Panti said prayers into her wrists and forehead,
prescribed herbal steam baths, and gave her a mixture of fresh green leaves.
She had tears in her eyes. “Have faith, my daughter, because God will
help us all, if we but ask. Faith. That is what cures. I chop the medicine, I
look for it in the jungle, I make the fires, roast the herbs, and apply them,
but it is faith that heals.”
Later in the afternoon, the young San Antonio policeman wandered in
asking if Panti could do something for his chronic migraine headaches.
“Yes, there’s a cure, but are you brave?” Panti asked. The policeman
shifted uncomfortably and said, “Uhhh, yes, why do you ask?”
“Because the best thing for this is pinchar, he announced as he reached
under his table, pulled out a dusty glass jar, and emptied a four-inch, bonecolored
stingray spine into his palm. Recently archaeologists had uncovered
a stingray spine in the tomb of a H’men. As Don Elijio washed the spine
and the policeman’s forehead with alcohol, I wondered if the archaeologists
had ever seen a stingray spine in action.
Don Elijio stood up tall and confidently, pinched the flesh of the man’s
forehead between his fingers, and quickly pierced the flesh three times in