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Acapulco Herbal Medicine

BELIZE, the smallest nation in Central America, has about 200,000 inhabitants of Maya, Ladino, Garifuna, East Indian, Mennonite, and English descent. During a visit in 1987, I heard about an American woman, a healer, who lived in the jungle in western Belize. The woman -- Rosita Arvigo -- was the apprentice of Don Eligio Panti, Belize's most respected Maya healer and a lonely old man living in the Maya village of San Antonio along the Macal River. Word had it that thousands of people were coming to see her from all over the Americas and Europe. So, on my last trip, I arranged to meet her in the town of San Ignacio, in the Cayo District. The following is based on my journal.

I AWOKE EARLY TO A CACOPHONY Of bird whistles and monkey howls, the jungle down the road shrieking distantly. As I walked into town from the hotel, the sun already hung hot over the Macal.

At Eva's restaurant, a tall, striking woman strode in. Persian and Italian blood conspired to make her look like a dark, deep-eyed madonna, not so much beautiful as astonishingly alive. Rosita Arvigo had her black hair cut short; she was dressed in a simple white blouse and print skirt. Her daughter, Crystal, long-legged, blonde, and looking as American as they come, giggled sweetly behind her.

"More, More, can I go shopping while you talk -- please?" Crystal asked.

"Sure, honey, but just for a few minutes," responded Rosita. The girl was gone in a flash. Rosita and I introduced ourselves as a pale British private ordered eggs at the next table. I'm a writer and artist. She's a Maya healer, a holistic naturecure doctor, an herbalist, a doctor of naprapathy, and a diet therapist running the Ix Chel Farm and Tropical Research Center in Belize. Her words have a no-nonsense, street-smart American ring to them. She talks like she's from the north side of Chicago, which she is.

"How did you become a Maya healer?" I had to ask right away.

"Why don't you come home with us for lunch and I'll tell you the story," said Rosita. This meant gathering a few supplies in the market, collecting Crystal and climbing down to a muddy spot along the Macal. We boarded the 10:30 commuter dugout. The canoe was crowded with Maya villagers and bags of food. Mr. Green revved up the motor and we headed upriver. Along the banks, lush and wild, I occasionally caught glimpses of thatched-hut villages. Mr. Green pushed with a pole to get us over rocky shallows.

An hour and fifteen minutes later we clambered up a steep bank and the jungle parted on a lovely homestead, Ix Chef, named for the Maya goddess of healing. A cluster of white stucco buildings with tall, graceful, thatched-palm roofs stood among flowers, herbs and giant pineapple stalks.

Rosita and I went into the kitchen "house" -- spacious, spotless and comfortably furnished -- and began to slice cucumbers.

"In 1983, I wanted to learn the local medicinal plants to include them in our healing practices," Rosita explained as she chopped. "Everyone said to go see Numero Uno. Don Eligio. He's more than a curandero. He's the H'man -- which in Mayan means healer-priest. He's the one who knows," she said as she started on leafy greens. "He treats both physical and spiritual ills and does divination. He's a shaman. So I went and asked if he'd teach me. He said no.

"Don Eligio had tried to teach several male relatives before but they had not maintained interest," Rosita continued. "This is what's happening all over Central America: the young generation is not interested. There are fewer and fewer apprentices. The old ways are being lost.

"It took a year for me to gain his confidence, a year of being his daughter, his confidante, making myself useful. Then he realized that at the age of 85 he had no other student. It fell to me by default. He did not want to teach a foreigner. He felt that all would be lost if I left. I had to promise two things: that I'd practice and not leave his people with no one to do this work, and that I would not leave Belize."

Her apprenticeship lasted five years and ended in 1988. "Don Eligio says I'm graduated now," she says with a broad smile. "I always thought it was a little like medical school, one teacher, one student, and the field was our laboratory. Little houses were our clinic and hospital." She and Don Eligio, now in his nineties, remain close. She gathers his plants and acts as his clinical assistant. "I make his amulets, powders, herbal remedies. I'm his pharmacy for his clinic and hospital in San Antonio. I'm also his doctor; I kidnap him for a few days at a time, the only way to make him rest." He's lonely and depressed since his wife died. She tries to keep his spirits up.

"What I've learned from the Maya is that it is unnatural to separate the spiritual and physical," Rosita continued. "The Maya have a medical religious system. The spiritual and physical life are separated only by a gossamer veil; life is a continuum. It's a very spiritual healing process." The medicine Rosita learned from Don Eligio is not the same as the medicine practiced during the Classic Maya period (300 AD - 900 AD). "Maya medicine today is an amalgam of the ancient, medieval, and modern," she said. It includes traditions brought over by the Spanish, who conquered most of Central America in the sixteenth century.

Rosita looked young, strong, and effortlessly at ease as she prepared our lunch. It was hard to believe that she was nearing fifty and had a son in his mid-twenties. Born in the Old Town section of Chicago, she earned a BA in French, then dropped out in 1968 to move to California. "I joined the hippie revolution," is how she phrased it. In 1970, she moved to a remote region of Mexico to escape the turmoil of the Vietnam era. There she lived with the Nahuatl Indians in Guerrero, a fourteen-hour walk from the village, which was a twenty-hour bus ride from the Acapulco Highway. "We grew all of our food; 65 percent was a wild-food diet -- berries, Huts, leaves, roots, beans, fruits."

It was in Guerrero that she first fell in love with plants and found she had a knack for healing. "Using medicinal plants is a very big part of the lives of the Nahuatl. To learn, I followed women and children around. I discovered I enjoyed being a farmer. I consider myself a farmer-doctor; that's what I always wanted to be, and I like to see my dreams come true."

In 1976 she returned to the States, and eventually decided to enroll in a Doctor of Naprapathy program in Chicago. "I didn't want to be an M.D." In 1983 she and her husband, Greg Shropshire (also a healer), bought 35 acres of uncleared land and began to build.

Today they farm, treat patients, have people for fasts and rests, and conduct seminars. They're visited by groups like the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, the British Army (in Belize until longstanding territorial disputes with neighboring Guatemala are settled), and class trips. Tourists and people from the surrounding villages come to be treated for infected bug bites, skin conditions, coral burns, amoebas, and parasites.

"What we get are the people who have been failed by the medical profession," explained Rosita as she sliced cheese. "What is most difficult for them is easiest for us and vice versa. We are complementary. I think there should be medical freedom. Not everyone is a candidate for holistic health nor should everyone automatically be a candidate for allopathic care."

She and Shropshire conduct three- to ten-day seminars for doctors and nurses, in which they teach health for living, Maya medicine, herbology and shamanism. They offer these seminars because they believe nontraditional practitioners and Western practitioners need to work more closely together.

"What's the point of defaming one another when we can work together? I want doctors to come and discuss traditional healing and try it for themselves. At one time all doctors were herbalists. I'd like to say that doctors have forgotten their roots.

"There's a lot of hope in the world for the integration of traditional medicine. I know a lot of young doctors who are totally open to integration. They really want to learn."

The mainstream medical establishment is becoming more aware of the value of traditional medicine. Ix Chel is funded by the Institute of Economic Botany of the New York Botanical Gardens with monies from USAID and the National Cancer Institute. Their goal is to study the relationship between plants and people in Belize. This means they study the plants, healers, and healing systems of Belize's eight cultural groups: Mopan/Maya, Kekchi' Maya, Yucatec Maya, Ladino, Mennonite, Garifuna, East Indian, and Creole. (Belize is a unique place for a study like this. There are few countries with so few people but such a diverse population.)

Ix Chel also collects plant samples that are sent to the National Cancer Institute as part of a project to survey the hemisphere's tropical plants for species with anti-HIV and anticancer factors. In 1986, Don Eligio and Rosita bushed a onemile plant trail she calls the Panti Trail, after her teacher. The trail is to educate people about the value of plants that naturally exist in the Belize environment.

Rosita and Dr. Michael Balick, director of the Institute of Economic Botany and chairman of Ix Chel, are writing a book on local plants people in Belize can use for healing. They are trying to reconstruct knowledge about the Maya medical system. Their work is one of a handful of projects worldwide that hope to study rainforest plants and knowledge before deforestation occurs. "I've always felt that Don Eligio's knowledge belongs not just to Belize but to the world," said Rosita as she put the final touches on the colorful feast that would soon be our lunch.

I was never into organic food until this meal was set out on the table. It was one of the freshest, most delicious meals I've ever had -- thin wheat bread with mustard and tuna open-faced, sweet and perfect carrots, cukes, collard greens, parsley, cheese, red tomatoes, peppermint water and soft green coconut.

No sooner had we finished than a middle-aged American woman appeared at the top of the riverbank. She was breathing heavily from the sharp climb. "I'm looking for Rosita," she said quietly. "Do you think she can help me with my pain?" Rosita disappeared with the woman into the "healing house." Crystal took my hand and took me for a swim in the river. Then she showed me her room (amazingly like any teenager's room in Chicago) and taped me the greatest hits of Belize, a combination of Punta Rock, reggae and Bob Marley.

Later I saw the woman leave, looking relieved, and found Rosita in the kitchen cleaning up after lunch. "I don't really have any problem that needs to be healed," I told her. After lunch and swim I exuded health and energy; I felt strong and resilient, warm and happy. My only complaint was a vague sense of discomfort with modern life and the concern that life was not going where I wanted. "You're doing fine," she said. "It'll happen," just in passing, as she rinsed off the last dish and set it out to dry.

Some Useful Plants

Rosita Arvigo works in partnership with Dr. Michael Balick of the Institute of Economic Botany at the New York Botanical Gardens. "It's a very uncommon approach for a classically trained scientist to work with a healer trained in nontraditional practices," said Dr. Balick. "Rosita and I are convinced this is the best approach." Healers and scientists need to work together in order to better understand the medicinal properties of the world's plants. "We're convinced this will be the approach of the nineties."

Dr. Balick provided information about some of the plants commonly used by the Maya. These are all found along Ix Chel's Panti Trail.

Cohune Palm (Orbignya cohune): This can be used as a cooking oil and as a skin ointment. The shell can be burned as charcoal.

Cockspur (Acacia cornigera): The thorns of the cockspur are collected and boiled into a tea. People use this tea to wash with. It's also used to treat acne. The bark is useful against snakebites, according to Maya bush doctors.

Spanish EIder (Piper amalgo): It has an aromatic leaf that people use as a pulpus when they have a toothache or swollen gums. Dripped on a cut, its juice promotes healing.

Bay Cedar (Guazuma ulmifolia): The bark is boiled and used to calm the stomach. It's also used for dysentery.

Skunk Root (Petiveria alliacae): The root is made into a tea, used to treat stomach ulcers.

Pa Sak (Simaruba glauca): Good for dysentery and restoring the tone of the intestines.

Copal (Protium copal): If you have a toothache, you poke a piece of fresh resin inside the cavity. The resin is supposed to expand and push the bad tooth out.

Guava (Psidium guajava): Its bark, taken as a tea, is good for dysentery and diarrhea.

Wild Yam (Dioscorea): This is said to build the blood (bad blood is a disease concept in Belize).

Poisonwood (Metropium browneii)/Gumbo-Limbo Tree (Bursura simaruba): Poisonwood gives you poison-ivy-like symptoms. The gumbo-limbo tree always grows near where poisonwood grows. Its sticky inner bark is rubbed on a wound from the poisonwood.

COPYRIGHT 1992 Point Foundation
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