I chose not to pay much attention to Greg’s comment. I was too busy thinking. “If he did agree to teach me, do you think we could afford it?” I thought out loud.
“That’s going to be tough to do right now, Rose. I’ve got seven dollars in my pocket,” Greg chuckled, as he pulled out the linings of his pockets to show off a few crumpled bills and a couple of stray nails.
We started laughing and called ourselves crazy people as we huddled by the open window and watched a silvery moon rise, sipping on Lemon Grass tea. The jungle, so black it was almost invisible, seemed like our friend again. As we listened to the chorus of river frogs and crickets, rising and falling in the night, we convinced ourselves that what we had dreamed was still possible.
We decided I would go to visit Don Elijio the following week.
CHAPTER TWO
Breadnut Ramon Chacox
Brosimum alicastrum
The fruits of the Ramon tree once provided a staple food to the ancient Maya and Aztec Indians. The fruits are boiled and eaten like young potatoes or ground into a cereal-like gruel and sweetened. The cooked ground nuts combined with corn make an excellent, nutritious tortilla and help to stretch the supply of corn. The flavor of Ramon nuts is reminiscent of chestnuts. The leaves of the tree are highly valued for female animals that have recently given birth because they greatly increase and enrich the milk supply. The diluted white, milky sap may be fed to newborn infants as a milk substitute when mother’s milk is not available.
The dry season had begun, and our farm surprised us by quickly transforming itself from a mud slide into a dust bowl. Until the grass we planted patch by patch began to grow, we were going to suffer through a cycle of mud drying into dust, dust churning into muck. This was taking a heavy toll on our fragile gardens, which either washed away or became parched in the blistering sun, leaving the soil cracked and split, as if there had been an earthquake.
In the peach-colored dawn the family was enjoying a tropical breakfast of bread and fruits. It was one week after my first encounter with Panti. This was Crystal’s first day of school at Sacred Heart Primary School in San Ignacio, and I was hoping it would be my first day of school in San Antonio with Panti.
We climbed down the steep, slippery bank to the river. Mr. Thomas Green, a tall, thin, dark-skinned Creole man in his seventies, was at the helm of the twenty-one foot dory, which he’d fashioned himself from a giant tubroos tree. I squeezed in among the children and schoolbags and asked Mr. Thomas to drop me across the river. “I’m going to see the old bush doctor, Elijio Panti,” I announced, relishing the sound of my adventure.
“You gwen go see di ole man?” he said excitedly, in the Creole-English that most Belizeans speak. “Dat good. Me like di bush med’sin. E good and di ole man know plenty,” he added, while deftly maneuvering to the opposite bank. In Belizean fashion, he pointed with his lips, letting me know where the hidden trail began. It led up the hill connecting the bush to the main road to San Antonio. Waving good-bye to my daughter, I took the first step on my journey.
I was plagued with guilt about leaving Greg alone on the farm. He had the daunting task before him of hauling dead trees and logs into a pile, which would later be burned. With the onset of the winter rains, our homestead would become a snake den, with the creatures lurking under the dozens of piles of rotting brush we’d created. We still had so much left to clear, since the jungle was less than a dozen feet from where we slept at night.
He’d had such a small breakfast. I worried how he’d have the stamina to pile up tree trunks, and the mental image of his eating lunch alone was painful.
“Maybe I shouldn’t go today, love,” I had protested, but he had insisted that I go.
He had assured me he’d be able to cope, and our neighbor Mick Fleming was coming by to lend a hand. Mick and Lucy and their children were our only neighbors for miles. They were slowly and lovingly converting eighty-seven acres into an elegant jungle resort.
As I climbed up the bank the farm disappeared from view. Decades of treading bare feet had left an almost invisible sliver of soft, brown earth under the jungle growth. With one arm acting as a blind navigator I stepped into the thick brush. My machete tore through the vines. I took steady blows for a hundred feet until the workout tired me and my clothes were soaked with the sap-laden dew dripping off the plants.
I turned for a moment to gaze at the Macal River. It was steaming with a mist that swirled up from the surface like a Chinese dragon. Droplets of moisture ran off the trees and steadily plopped into the water, bursting into rainbow-colored rings of light that shimmered with the images above them. Hundreds of hidden chachalaca birds sang out in a chattering disharmony, piercing the morning quiet. This was a glorious moment for me. I felt welcomed by the forest and reveled in being surrounded by the abundant, luxuriant growth of plants and anticipating the key of knowledge that would unlock the secrets they held.
I remembered why we loved Belize so much. We were far from smog, the roar of traffic, and city grays. I stood above the bank, captivated by this magical glimpse of Mother Nature in her bedchamber, and sighed.
Red, biting ants crawled up my leg and rudely jolted me out of my dreamy state. I reached up inside my pant leg and brushed them off, then forged deeper into the jungle.
Early rays of sunlight streaked through the thick forest canopy, creating a shimmering jade glow. I startled a flock of rainbow-beaked toucans, which skittered away, reluctantly fleeing the tree where they were feeding on Ramon nuts. My eyes kept taking in new sights, although if I looked away from the path too long, needlelike thorns tore away at my flesh.
I followed the trail for nearly a mile, wandering through a wild profusion of waving palms, red shaggy-barked trees, aromatic vines, and swarms of iridescent insects and butterflies. Then a broad shaft of light ahead signaled the end of the cool, shady forest. Soon I stepped out onto the road and was quickly washed in white heat.
The road veered off in two directions from where I stood, and I nervously studied the tattered map. The Cayo District in which we lived was the westernmost part of the country and shared a long border with Guatemala. Belmopan, the capital of Belize, was in the eastern part of the district, while the town of San Ignacio was in the west. Scattered throughout were tiny villages like San Antonio, accessible only by rough roads and rivers. Our farm was six miles south—by river—from San Ignacio. San Antonio was five miles east of our farm, in the foothills of the Maya Mountains.
That sounded simple, but the roads were confusing. I started walking toward the right, wondering if I was lost. As far as I could see, I had five miles more of dusty road to go. And after a few minutes, sweat began running into my eyes, despite my straw hat, with its brim curled down to cut the penetrating glare. After two hours of hiking, I saw a whimsical, hand-painted wooden sign: “Welcome to San Antonio. Population 860.” I walked up a steep, grassy knoll and saw the village unfold before me, with its red rooftops and rainbow-colored houses. They looked like a handful of hard candies spilled onto a lush, green carpet. Between the wooden and cement houses were carefully tended gardens with rows of sprouting vegetables. Brilliant bougainvillea in deep purple and warm yellow alamandas cascaded over wooden fences.
Maya people had lived in this valley surrounded by mountains for over a thousand years. Recently, archaeologists had excavated a field behind one of the village farms, finding an unusually large number of musical instruments in the more than three hundred homesites of the ancient Maya. The village, which archaeologists call Pacbitun, was ruled by the ancient city of Caracol, just thirty miles up the road.
I tried to imagine the ancient settlement, but modern San Antonio kept reemerging with its duet of barking dogs and blaring radios. Playful children ran up to me, singing out, “Gringa, gringa, gimme sweet.” Their mothers scolded them in Mayan, and the children called back in a hybrid of Mayan, Spanish, and English, reminding me of a line from a Mexican revolutionary song: niños mismo color de mi tierra. Children
the same color as my land.
Several women were turning peanuts they’d spread out on palm woven mats to dry in the sun. They waved as I walked by. I had seen no men, since it was September, harvest time for corn and beans in the fields just beyond the village.
Ahead on the road, three bronze, barefoot Maya women approached, balancing sacks of corn on their heads and babies in their arms. “Buenos días. Where, please, is the house of Elijio Panti?” I asked.
Their eyes darted playfully back and forth to each other, and they covered their mouths to mask their giggling. One pretty, almond-eyed woman pointed to the cluster of huts just inches from where I stood.
Panti’s home and clinic reminded me of the old Chinese proverb: Sometimes, the greatest people in a village look like no more than a turtle in the mud. A dilapidated gray shack made of sticks and leaves leaned against a small, sturdy cement house with a zinc roof. Behind them stood a thatch hut with most of its walls torn away and a roof with gaping holes, open to both sun and rain.
A plump woman stood outside a general store just a stone’s throw from Panti’s front door. She eyed me closely before telling me he was out “andando en el monte.” Walking in the mountains. I followed her into her one-room store, crammed full of tins, chocolate, coffee, lard, cloth, brooms, and buckets of pickled pig tails. She opened the door to a rusty, gas-fired refrigerator, and I gratefully chose a cool tin of Guatemalan juice.
While she left to fetch her crying baby, I settled onto a stool in a shadowy corner. The woman returned and sat down near me to nurse her baby. She was Isabel, the wife of Angel, Don Elijio’s grandson, she said, explaining that the old man was very busy, with patients trickling in all day long and sometimes into the night.
“Are you sick?” she asked, looking me over for telltale signs of disease. “You can wait in his kitchen. He should be back just before noon when the patients start arriving by transport.”
The door to one of the thatch huts hung open, barely attached by a broken hinge. I stepped inside and the coolness of the interior surprised me. So did the state of disrepair. The walls displayed more stick than mud, and more than half the adobe was chipped away.
The room was no more than ten by ten feet. Three chopping blocks sat on the floor, surrounded by a dozen sacks of leaves, dried medicines, and corn. I could see no modern conveniences. It could have been A.D. 800 except for the nearby cement house with its zinc roof.
I had lived in huts like this one in Mexico. Panti’s had a well-crafted clay hearth, where a brazen hen ruffled her feathers in a cloud of ashes. An enormous black pig grunted in the doorway and made a move to come inside and rifle through a basket of dried corncobs. “Cuchi, cuchi,” I shouted and rushed at him. The pig stared dead blank into my eyes and shuffled away at his own pace.
“They respect no one and no place,” said a man in Spanish, stepping into the hut with a woman and small child in tow. Once settled onto stools, we exchanged the usual friendly greetings. “My baby is sick,” the woman said as she tenderly stroked the child’s head. “She is four years old but as you can see looks no more than two.”
The listless young girl looked up at me, igniting my healing instincts, with her arm dropped askew, pathetically out of her control. She drooled a bit and groaned, turning again to her mother for comfort. The child’s eyes looked vacant and her breath was shallow. I could see her heart beating like a trapped bird under her paper-thin, lavender dress.
The girl had been vomiting and suffering from diarrhea for months, the mother said. They had taken her to clinics in Guatemala and in Mexico’s Yucatán before running out of money.
“All the doctors say the same thing,” said the mother. “‘We see nothing on the machines, so there’s nothing wrong with your child. She just needs better food and vitamins.’” However, a nurse in Guatemala had suggested they see the great healer, Don Elijio.
“Are there no curanderos in your own village near Merida?” I asked, surprised they had traveled so far to find a bush doctor.
“There used to be, but they’re all dead and nobody learned,” she said, letting out a doleful sigh.
It was true. Around the globe, traditional healers find it increasingly difficult to find apprentices to carry on their work. This is especially so in developing countries, where the need for traditional remedies still remains vital while the practitioners are dying out.
People don’t want to appear “backward” by associating with these remaining healers. Many prefer the methods of Western doctors in white lab coats, who dole out expensive synthetic drugs—some culled from the very plants and herbs growing in their native soil. Christian missionaries have also made people feel ashamed of traditional healing by labeling it devil’s work. Traditional healing has become so confused with black magic that many now fear working with spiritual forces, even when used for healing and service.
I craned my neck for some sign of Panti and spotted his small, sturdy frame trudging up the hill behind the huts. Through slits in the walls, I saw him inching up the hillside with a heavy sack strapped to his head in the ancient Maya style. I rose to help him, amazed at the weight of the sack as I lifted it off.
“Buenos días,” he said. “Just put that inside. First I must drink, then I will attend to you.” I got a warm feeling seeing him again, but he barely noticed me as he glanced inside the dark hut to check how many patients were waiting. Within seconds, a smiling grandchild appeared with a brimming cup of atole. I recognized the warm, sweet brew made from ground corn kernels, traditional in Central America. With his drink, he disappeared into the cement house.
The transport truck from San Ignacio arrived at 11:30. There were no buses to villages off the main roads, so enterprising individuals bought trucks and ran on regular schedules, carrying up to thirty people, chickens, and farm supplies. Three people alighted, looking quite lost. The driver motioned in the direction of the kitchen, and soon seven of us were crowded into the tiny house. We watched the chickens pecking and scratching in the dirt floor near our feet.
As we waited for Don Elijio, a lively conversation sprang up. It was a warm and comfortable exchange, much more suited to a gathering of old friends than strangers waiting for a doctor. We chatted easily about the difficulties encountered on the road, the details of each person’s ailment, and the hot weather.
When the patients spoke of Don Elijio, they respectfully called him el viejito, the old man, numero uno, or el mero, the authentic one.
Panti finally stepped inside and announced he was ready for patients. “I have been healing in this way, with my prayers, my roots, my vines and barks for forty years now,” he told us, moving his arms about to punctuate each sentence. “I cure diabetes, high blood pressure, even cancer. I never went to school—cannot even sign my name—but up here, it’s full.” He tapped his forehead with a plant-stained fingertip.
The parents of the sick child got up, lifted their daughter, and followed him into the cement house. I peered into the room and saw the parents lay the girl down on a makeshift bed: an old door frame laid flat across two cement blocks. When they took the wrappings off her legs, I was shocked to see many infected, staphlike sores.
“The child has worms and ciro [gastritis]…and dirty blood,” said Panti. “But ciro is her main problem. Oh, I know that old cabron [goat] Don Ciriaco well. He loves to fool doctors, but he can’t trick me.
“There are three types of ciro,” he explained. “There is dry ciro, with constipation, red ciro, with bloody stools, and white ciro, with mucus in the stools.”
First her digestion had gone bad and her blood become dirty. Then the worms had proliferated and the sores developed. “Dirty blood always has to come out through the skin,” he explained.
“For me it is no mystery. She will be cured, mamasita, have no fear. God will help us all.”
He ambled back into the kitchen/waiting room to fill a cloth sack with dried herbs, scooping them out of a large sack leaning against the hearth. He reached overh
ead to crush some dried plants hanging from the rafters, which I recognized as Epasote (Mexican Wormseed), and then he retreated to the cement house. Soon uproarious laughter came spilling out.
The same pattern ensued with each group of patients. “I’ve been healing this way for forty years,” he’d boast dramatically, reminding me of an actor on stage. Then he’d take the patients to the cement house. He’d come back to the thatch hut for herbs. Then I’d hear laughter.
Hours later, he reappeared—showing no sign of fatigue—after having tended to all the patients. I was the only person left in the waiting room, and he now repeated his speech to me. “So what is your problem?” he asked.
“I’m not sick, Don Elijio. I’m Rosita. I’ve come to visit you. I am the woman you met last week in San Ignacio. Do you remember we talked about herbs and healing and I asked if I could visit you?”
He tapped his forehead. “Ah, it’s these eyes, you know. Your face looks like a smoky mask to me. I am strong and stiff enough,” he said, “to marry a fifteen-year-old.” Except for his eyes, he lamented. “Now I wouldn’t know if I was kissing a woman or a tree. Soon I won’t be able to collect medicine for the patients.”
“I would be happy to be your eyes in the forest,” I offered. “I too am a healer and I need to learn about these plants.”
“Oh, so you want to learn, child? It is good that you are interested in the plants, but I cannot teach you.”
“I wouldn’t be a bother to you, Don Elijio, I can see you’re a busy man. I’ll do whatever I can to be of service.” He asked again if I was a Mexicana, and I repeated that I was an American from Chicago.
“It would do no good to teach a gringa,” he said sadly. “You must go home one day, it is only natural, and what I taught you would be lost up there. I am eighty-seven now and nobody here wants to learn. They come for healing, yes. But, where is the one who will open his heart to this hard work?”
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