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