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June 21, 2005
Indigenous Medicine in Ruku Llakta
I didn't really realize how much I'm not a city person till a week ago, on my first bus trip out of Quito after 2.5 weeks straight there and seeing the beauty of Ecuador’s different ecosystems pass by. These included Páramo, or high Andean tundra, Cloudforest, and Amazon rainforest. Portland, Oregon (where I lived last summer) and Providence are both fairly residential cities, without quite the same amount of chaos and hustle and bustle as New York or San Francisco (I haven't lived there since I was 6) or Quito. It was a relief, it was exactly what I needed, and I was able to find balance again.
On this trip, I voyaged to a village in the rainforest near Tena with three friends (Jess Weisberg, from Brown, her boyfriend Ben, and my friend Claudia who was from my study abroad program in Ecuador). We went to visit our friend from our program MJ, who for her Independent Study Project in Ecuador (each of us conducted one during the final month of studies here) lived with and documented the life of her now-friend who is a powerful female shaman. She came back on a grant this summer to continue her research which she hopes to turn into a senior thesis in Anthropology.
After spending time with some Ecuadorians in the central plaza in Tena, just chatting about life with two men and a teenager while eating some baby bananas (oritos), we took a ride in the back of a pickup to go swimming. It had been a long time since I had done this, and the act is really representative of Ecuador for me, with a whole family laughing and enjoying life in the back. After that excursion, we headed to find MJ and the shaman Janeth in her mostly-indigenous village of Ruku Llakta. Janeth is an incredibly well-respected shaman who says she has only used her powers for good. Supposedly, she is unique in this, but she explained that if you use your powers once in a less-than-benevolent way, there is no turning back. She seemed like a woman with incredibly inner strength who, at the same time, enjoyed joking with her cousin and MJ and watching telenovelas and playing with her dog Espiderman.
That night, we took ayahuasca under Janeth’s supervision and it was incredibly interesting. Ayahuasca is a drink made by boiling the root of the ayahuasca bush. Before taking a shot-sized amount, you ask the spiritual owner of the ayahuasca bush what you want to see (a person, or a sickness, or one's future or love), and supposedly you will see visions of that, although often not in a straight-away direct way (symbolic images which might mean a given thing). Janeth usually uses it for healing purposes and asks to see the physical manifestation of a sickness so she can remove it from the afflicted person. Supposedly, ayahuasca allows one to enter another world (which exists, but is just not usually accessible) that allows people to see the same things in their true form. It is quite safe, and in fact, everyone in the Pachamama office went on a retreat last April to the Achuar village of Sharamentsa and took it. As Pachamama is undergoing a period of reevaluating its policies and direction, they asked the owner of the ayahuasca bush about the future of Pachamama and in what direction it should head.
One knows the ayahuasca is taking affect when one hears a beating in the head: for me, it was helicopters and for Ben it was African drums. I never saw visions, although I was affected physically (walking in a zigzag when I went to the bathroom). Each of us had such absolutely different reactions and was on totally individual wavelengths. I asked Janeth about my reaction and lack of visions the next day, and she said all the ayahuasca went to my body and not my head, and that it was healing my body. I explained to her that I had been sick from food poisoning earlier in the week, and she said the ayahuasca just cleaned me out, and that if I did it again that night I would see visions. I thought that would be a bit too much to handle, and we headed back to Quito that day. Although I was towards the tail end of any symptoms of my sickness, after taking the ayahuasca I’ve been perfectly healthy. Janeth had stated many times about the healing powers of ayahuasca, both in finding a sickness in others and in healing a sickness in the person taking it. I believe it, and was quite fascinated by the experience.
Posted by Lee Gilman at June 21, 2005 11:47 AM
