“It was very hard for me to have my babies, tatito,” Lola cried, “and it took me a long time, a very long time, to recover afterward. What is wrong with me? The doctors and nurses say there is nothing wrong, but I know something isn’t right. I come with faith to see you.”
“Come, I must examine you,” answered Don Elijio, motioning to her and to me to follow him into the examining room.
Lola lay down on the mattress and raised up her skirt, exposing a soft brown belly with many stretch marks. He began to examine her abdomen just above the line of pubic hair. Within a minute he exclaimed confidently, “Aha! There’s your sickness. The womb is out of position. It’s too low and lying on the right side. You have headaches, numbness in your right foot, weakness in the legs, and constipation. Your periods are early, then late. You see clots of blood, dark blood. You feel tired often. Is all this true?”
“Why yes, tatito, it is all just as you say!” Lola shot me a look of shock and wonder. “What should I do?”
“It is what I will do, not you,” he answered as he went to work.
Deep, deep into her flesh he dug his gnarled, expert hands. Lola groaned and stiffened in discomfort. She covered her face with her hands and turned away.
“Come here, Rosita, feel this,” he said.
He manipulated her abdomen to expose under his fingers a soft, bulbous object off to the right side just above the pelvic bone. Copying his hand movements, I too could feel the uterus. I saw what he meant: it did seem too low and too far to the right.
“Now watch,” said Don Elijio, smiling. He leaned over Lola and pulled upward with his hands, dragged her skin to a center position, and then jiggled the flesh vigorously. He repeated this again and again, then slowly pushed from the right side of her abdomen to the center, and from the hollow above the pelvic bone upward. As he kneaded and massaged, he whispered prayers.
I could see the uterus responding and moving. “Now feel this,” he said. I put my hands on the woman’s pelvis. Where the uterus had been just minutes before was a soft hollow. The organ had moved to its proper place quickly and, this time, almost painlessly under his deft care.
He showed Lola how to use a faja, a band that is tied around the pelvis to help hold and heal the uterine ligaments. As she sat up and straightened her clothes, he cautioned her sternly about going barefoot on cold floors, especially cement floors. He told her not to take cold drinks, then warned her against having sexual relations with her husband when she had her period. The latter, he explained, was the greatest abomination ever perpetrated on women.
“The semen mixes with menstrual fluids and causes large clots to adhere to the uterine wall,” he told her. “This leads to ulcerations and tumors.”
He motioned for us to follow him back into the other room, where he rummaged through his plant bags and prepared the Sacca Todo mixture.
“Drink the medicine for ten days before menstruation for the next three months,” he said, “then come back when the medicine is finished.” He told her to expect some thick, dark fluids to pass. “Don’t be alarmed,” he assured her. “That is your sickness coming out.”
“Better an empty apartment than a bad tenant,” I joked, using one of my mother’s favorite lines. Both Don Elijio and Lola looked at me and giggled.
After she left, I asked him why it is that so many women have displaced uteri.
“Modern life,” he answered laconically, “carrying heavy loads too soon after childbirth. Midwives, doctors, and nurses who don’t put belly bands on the woman after delivery to ensure the uterus is returned to its rightful place. That’s bad care.
“Also those horrid, ugly shoes with the sticks in the back,” he bemoaned. “And walking barefoot on cold floors and wet grass, especially in the early morning hours.”
He said nervousness and anxiety in modern women also exacerbated uterine weakness. When a woman’s muscles were tense, the blood supply to the uterus decreased, thereby setting the stage for problems to develop.
Don Elijio was famous for his ability to correct uterine displacement. Once a taxi full of young and middle-aged women arrived from San Ignacio for the express purpose of having their uteri replaced. Each recounted a string of familiar symptoms, and, one by one, he led them into the examination room.
One woman in her sixties had a uterus that was particularly far afield. It was lying nearly below the inguinal ligament, just above the thigh. He instructed her to lie on her stomach as he skillfully executed a sophisticated chiropracticlike technique to her sacrum.
He pressed down on the small of her back as he brought both feet towards her buttocks, simultaneously executing the forward motion of one hand with the backward pull of the legs. He did this, he told me, in chronic cases of longstanding displacement to strengthen the ligaments that hold the uterus to the sacrum.
Her daughter, a grandmother in her forties, came in afterward. She complained of a bothersome yeast infection that did not yield to usual medical treatment. “They give me the medicine, I take it, the itching and burning goes away for a while and then comes right back,” she lamented.
This time he sat down on a stool and said, “You do it, Rosita. Tell me where you find it.”
Not too confidently, I began to examine her. I was amazed at how easy it was to determine the position of her uterus.
“I find it very low but in the center,” I told him.
Don Elijio got up and felt her belly. He nodded and smiled. “This is easy for her,” he told the woman proudly. “She knows the body well and is already a doctor. And a woman.”
“When we put your uterus where it should be, the itching will stop,” he said to the woman. The weight of the uterus on the vaginal tissues prevents proper flow of blood, lymph, and nerve currents, thus allowing the yeast to thrive. When the uterus is properly placed, the elements of the blood will adjust the pH of the vaginal wall, thereby making an unfavorable environment for the yeast.
Don Elijio returned her uterus to its proper place. “See here,” he said, pointing to the pelvic bone. “The width of two fingers above this bone is where a woman’s uterus should sit. No more and no less. And always be sure it is in the center.”
Because of his knowledge, Don Elijio had become legendary among midwives. In Belize, many women still rely on lay midwives for childbirth. In a country of remote villages with few ambulances and hospitals, midwives are accepted and respected members of the basic primary health care team. The country has an excellent system of training home birth attendants, in which women who want to become midwives are trained by other women.
San Antonio, like all other villages, had two or three women trained as midwives who took care of the vast majority of home births. They came to Don Elijio only when a patient was in serious trouble. Don Elijio had never lost a patient in childbirth. He was expert at coaxing intransigent babies to come out or to turn. He dealt with breech births with a series of manipulations and special prayers.
“I’ve never had to send a woman to the hospital,” he said. “My prayers and massage have helped every time. But the doctors are in such a hurry nowadays. Twelve hours of labor pass and they sharpen their knives.”
Once on a cold, rainy, winter night in January, a midwife came to his house and roused the old man out of his sleep.
“Get up, old man, I need you,” she said as she frantically knocked on his door. Don Elijio grabbed the plastic purse he used as his doctor’s bag and followed her back to the patient’s house. A baby—a girl—was already born and lay swaddled in the arms of a frightened ten-year-old boy. Their mother lay prone on a mattress of cloth rags, her uterus protruding from the birth canal. There it lay, he explained, like a pink balloon between her legs.
“I scolded the midwife for making the woman push too long and too hard,” he said. He called for someone to make a fire in the middle of the dirt floor. He took out a bottle of olive oil and a small clay bowl from the purse, then warmed the oil in the bowl over the coals. He poured the oil over
his hands and rubbed some onto the dislodged uterus.
Gently and slowly, whispering his Mayan prayers to Ix Chel, Goddess of childbirth, he gradually set the uterus back inside the pelvic cavity. “I heard it pop as it went back into position,” he said.
He asked for clean sterile cloths, which he pushed into her vagina to hold the uterus in place. Then he tied the faja around her pelvis to hold in her overstretched ligaments and gave her the baby to nurse, knowing that nipple stimulation contracts the uterus. An hour later, he removed the cloths and allowed the postpartum fluids to flow freely.
The woman recovered completely. “That was my twenty-seventh godchild,” he said proudly. “Her name is Gomercinda. They call her Chinda.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Balsam Tree Balsamo Na Ba
Myroxylon balsamum
The tree has a highly resinous and aromatic bark, which is used to treat both physical and spiritual diseases. A small square of the bark forms part of the Maya amulets or protección, carried to ward off envy, the evil eye, evil spirits, and black magic. The boiled bark is a primary remedy for conditions of the urinary tract and the liver.
The film Mosquito Coast was being shot in and around Belize. It’s a story about an obsessed man who brought his family to Central America to live in a jungle, where hardships eventually pitted them against each other and revealed the father’s coldness and selfish obsession with perfection.
One of the film crew’s favorite resting spots was Chaa Creek, by now the most famous of all the jungle resorts in Belize and known for its primitive elegance. Chaa Creek had a lush, tropical landscape with thatch roof bungalows and a stunning open-air bar overlooking the river.
Lucy and Mick introduced Greg and me to the film’s editor, Thomm Noble, who we learned had won an Academy Award for his work on the film Witness. We became friends. After a few days, Thomm and other crew members invited Lucy and me to accompany them on a trip to Tikal, the famous ancient Maya city ninety miles west of us in the Petén region of Guatemala.
We crossed the Belize-Guatemala border at an outpost about four miles west of Ix Chel Farm and headed west on the narrow dirt road through the jungle. It was a hot, bumpy ride. We sat on wooden benches in the back of the truck bed with dust swirling through the air and dirt flying into our faces.
The city-state of Tikal flourished in the Classic Maya era and is known for erect, graceful pyramids and its dominant position in the Maya lowlands. Until the early part of the twentieth century, the ruins of the city were covered by the jungle. When the city was rediscovered, it was excavated and reconstructed by archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania. That work is now continuing under the Guatemalan government. Today it is a vast park in the jungle in a sparsely populated area of northern Guatemala, once the favorite haunt of chicleros like Don Elijio.
It is hard not to be struck by the mystery of the Maya when entering the now-silent, stunning city. What happened to the Maya civilization? Why did the Maya suddenly abandon cities like Tikal over what is today Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador around A.D. 900? What were the ancient Maya like?
Lucy and I and our Hollywood visitors wandered around like children at a county fair, stopping to gaze at the temples, stelae, and picture carvings of the ancient Maya.
I couldn’t help think about Panti’s superstitions about Tikal. It was here that he and Jerónimo had studied plants, and he had warned me that the Maya Spirits who haunt the place could be dangerous. He would never set foot in the excavated and reconstructed Tikal. But I had been here many times and had never felt uncomfortable.
Thomm and I climbed to the top of Temple IV together and sat there for a long time enjoying the sweeping panorama of the rainforest below. The ghostly gray temples, once covered in natural red dyes, shimmered in the heat. The same dry winds that nearly destroyed the farm cooled us.
Thomm pulled out several lovely, large crystals from his pouch and spread them out in the sun. We watched the light play among the planes of the crystals as an eagle flew back and forth over our heads, almost daring us to reach out and touch him. We sat quietly, content to be surrounded by the sky and the howling winds.
The others called from below, and we descended the ragged, uneven steps. We both felt happy and peaceful when we got to the ground.
We arrived back in Belize late that night. I had a busy day ahead of me on the farm with patients scheduled back to back. Shortly after noon, Lucy and Mick’s young son, Piers, came skipping over clutching a note. It was from the film crew, informing me that Thomm had taken ill with turistas during the night. Could I help? the note pleaded.
In between patients, I prepared some of our Traveler’s Tonic, a brew we concocted of Jackass Bitters and wine to treat and prevent parasites and amoebas. I sent Piers back with a large bottle and a note with instructions.
Later in the day, one of the crew, a beautiful Eurasian woman, came over to say that Mr. Noble was grateful for the remedy, which had cured him, enabling them to travel again.
I was relieved to know he had recovered and pleased that the tonic had cured again. The woman left without offering to pay for the tonic, and a part of me was annoyed. After a few seconds, my annoyance passed. I let it go, telling myself: May God repay. I went back to my patients and didn’t give the matter a second thought.
At dusk, Piers was back again. I’m always glad to see him and walked outside the kitchen to greet him.
“Mr. Thomm sent me over to give this to you,” he said in his sweet, baby boy voice.
He opened his chubby, pink palm and plopped a gorgeous, oblong-shaped crystal into my hands. It was the loveliest of the crystals I had seen atop Temple IV glittering in the sun. Rainbow-colored areas of light shimmered within. It was huge—four inches long and three inches wide, coming to a graceful point at the top. Its size and weight felt perfect in my hand.
I wanted to run over and thank Thomm, but Piers told me that the crew had left and that Thomm had instructed him not to deliver the crystal until after they had driven away.
The next time I went to San Antonio, I brought the crystal with me to show Don Elijio. The moment he saw it, he jumped out of his seat, threw up his hands, and shouted, “Sastun! Sastun! They’ve sent you a sastun. How wonderful, my daughter, this is the sign I’ve been waiting for. Ix Chel sent this to you. Now I can teach you everything, everything. You can work in the spiritual as I do.”
“This is a sastun?” I sputtered. I flipped the heavy crystal over and over in my hand, waiting for its mystic abilities to become obvious.
“Yes, girl. This is not just a simple gift. This came right from the Maya Spirits. They used your friend as a carrier.”
He opened both his hands and gestured for me to place the crystal in his palms. He pushed back his Pepsi cap and stared intently into the stone. “Uh huh. See here.” He pointed to a corner of the crystal and showed me a rainbow-colored cross.
I really couldn’t believe what Panti had said. The Maya Spirits—the nine celestial beings at the core of the Maya culture—had sent me a sastun?
My sastun didn’t look anything like his small marble. I didn’t see how I’d be able to twirl this chunk of crystal the way he twirled his.
“Can I use this to get answers the way you do?” I asked.
“Well, I’m not sure,” he said. “The sastun can take many forms. I once had a sastun that I used only to see if a patient could be cured. It was thin as a pencil with a dot in the middle that would stretch from end to end when a patient who could not be cured held it in his hand. I once saw a blue sastun on a necklace.”
“How do you know a stone is a sastun?”
“I know by looking at it,” he said. “It has light that sparkles when it moves and you can peer into it as a mirror. You may find dots, lines, crosses, Virgins, and rainbows that give you answers. If you have the lamp to see it.”
“What do you mean by ‘lamp’?” I then asked.
“It’s something up here
that’s a don,” he said tapping his forehead. “A gift.”
Clearly Don Elijio had the gift. He regularly used his sastun to determine if a patient’s illness was rooted in natural causes or from daño, meaning brought on by spiritual forces. It was his sastun that carried requests and prayers beyond the gossamer veil to the Maya Spirits. In using it, he was carrying on an ancient tradition. Archaeologists had found sastuns in the burials of Maya shamans in the abandoned ancient cities.
My image of a sastun was that of a supernatural hot line to the Spirits. Don Elijio described it as a Stone of Light, Mirror of the Ages, Light of the Ages, and Stone of the Ages. He also called it a “plaything of the Maya Spirits.” He said they could be heard at night throwing a sastun back and forth to each other across rushing rivers, which fail to drown out the whirling sound of its fanciful flight.
The Spirits chose to whom to send the sastun. Some people prayed for a sastun all their lives but never received one. “Others don’t know what it is when it rolls by their feet while they’re playing in the sand,” Don Elijio said. “Often it falls from the sky in front of someone. But many fear it and try to throw it away. This is useless, as it will only come back.”
They fear it, as Jerónimo had, because of its drawing power. “When the Spirits sent me my sastun, the people came from very far because it calls them. Like me, it loves to work,” Panti told me happily.
Panti wanted to consult his sastun to verify that the Spirits had indeed sent me this gift. He lifted the little clay jar out of the rusty Oval-tine can where he stored his sastun.
He removed the washcloth that he kept stuffed into the neck of the jar to prevent the sastun from rolling out. Then he blew into the jar before spilling out his round, translucent marble into his hand. It sparkled, having just received its weekly bath, in rum, to cleanse it of the many questions he had asked it during the week.
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