Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

with his file. It was a small bit of gallantry, his way of doing something for
me.
We told stories to each other as we chopped. He loved to talk about his
Chinda. She had been so trusting, never questioning him about treating
women patients alone in their bedroom. “Even if I had to look at their
private parts, never once did she pull back the curtain and say, ‘What goes
on in here?’ No. Never would I put an evil hand on a woman patient. It’s a
sin. And I do not sin.”
He told me the sad tale of Chinda’s death.
“They killed her,” he snapped, with enough fresh anger to convince me
this was a wound that would forever fester. “Chinda had a hernia that I
could not cure. In spite of my plants and prayers, it would not go away. I
had to take her to the hospital in Belize City and let a doctor care for her.
Imagine me at the age of eighty-one, making my first trip to Belize City.”
Accepting that Chinda’s illness was beyond his abilities, he returned to
his village to continue harvesting his Christmas beans, planning to collect
her within a few days.
“But I was in my cornfield when suddenly my heart began to flutter and
pound in my chest. I dropped my tools and went home. People were
gathering around my doorstep, waiting to tell me that Chinda’s death had
just been announced on the radio. Mamasita, with those words, I fell to the
earth on my knees and fainted.”
When he got to the hospital, he found Chinda’s doctor upset and angry.
He explained to Panti that the operation had gone well and Chinda would
have recuperated without complications within a few days. But his
instructions to give only water for the first forty-eight hours and broth on
the third day were disobeyed. Instead of spoon-feeding broth to Chinda a
little bit at a time, a nurse left the broth and a plate of heavy food
unattended on the tray. When a hungry Chinda woke up, she gulped down
the soup and the meal and died a few hours later.
“She didn’t have to die. I shouldn’t have left her. Had I been there, she
would be here at my side today. I would never have let her eat that plate of
heavy food. I would have taken better care of my patient.”
Panti choked on the memory, finding little consolation in knowing the
doctor had fired the nurse responsible that same afternoon. “For three years
I was like a crazy person. I drank until I fell down in a stupor and cried