by Jacqi Terry
On Thursdays I travel 3 miles outside of San Ignacio to Bullet Tree Village, walk a mile along the Macal River, take a left into the rainforest, and sit down under a thatched roof with an old man who usually wears a purple sweater and a trucker hat. He isn’t much taller than I am–which, if you know me, isn’t very tall-and has leathery brown skin which has wrinkled folds so deep they must contain all the roots of his wisdom.
Usually the first thing he says to us is, “You’re late” and holds each of our hands warmly. Then while we talk in a medley of English and broken Spanish, he’ll go over to his work table, which is covered in rue leaves, wild yam, bear paw, and hundreds of other herbs, roots, and seeds and sort through them. He’ll giggle and laugh to himself because he’s actually no older than any of us, it’s just his skin and bones that have aged past the day of his birth.
This man’s name is Don Cocom, and he is a curandero, or a traditional Mayan healer. My friend Christine and I have been going to see him for over a month, learning thousands of years of plant medicine encapsulated in a few hours. He can point to every single plant on his property, no matter the size, and describe to you its spiritual and medicinal uses.
Last time I was there we walked to a point in the path where Don Cocom stopped us and grabbed a few spade shaped leaves from a nearby bush.
“This plant is called Tres Marias, the Three Maries in English, and it is part of the Nine Xiv, the holiest plants in Mayan medicine. If you have a mother, and she becomes sick after she gives birth, you must take the three best leaves, say 3 Our Father prayers-,” he then stops and looks to me, “You know the Our Father prayer?” I nod my head and he continues, “-and then pray with them in your palm and boil them in water for five minutes,” as he says this, he puts his hand spread out to show us, “-in two liters of water, and then wash the mother from head to foot.” He breaks the leaves he has grabbed in half and puts them up to his face, inhaling deeply, then continues, “But you can never wash the mother from foot to head, because then, it will spread the disease, the bad spirit will make her sicker.” He says this with a sort of fatherly impatience, as if we should know this already.
Don Cocom’s is a medicine that mixes Mayan spirituality and the Catholic faith. He will tell you that there are easy ways to know if you have a sickness from working too hard in the sun or because you’ve pissed off a spirit. Depending on what the cause is, he’ll tell you his prescription and walk off the trail to get you the medicine you need. Usually you boil or “mash up”, as he says, something to get the medicine out. He doesn’t believe in just covering up the symptoms, and after handing me a part of the Pheasant Tail plant one day, he laughed and said “See this? We use these roots because you need to cure the root of the problem, no cover up.”
Don Cocom will tell you that modern medicine will make you more ill than you already are, and for longer, because it treats symptoms, not sickness. In his opinion, if you’re taking a pill to try and cure a spiritual illness, such as depression, you will only agitate a spirit or ancestor more. Thus, Don Cocom attempts to find the core reason for sickness.
A few weeks ago a woman came to him while we were putting up signs with plant names on them. She asked for Man Vine, which is often used for rheumatism, but mostly for impotence. She was embarrassed to be asking about this in front of us, and when Don Cocom asked why she needed it, she said in Spanish, “My husband has been…shaky. I think he is getting old.” Don Cocom laughed; later he told us her husband was in his 40′s. He began talking to her about how long this had been going on, when it started, when he was the shakiest, and when she couldn’t answer these questions she spoke in Que’chi, a Mayan dialect, and Don Cocom’s helper told us that she had pretty much said her husband “wasn’t a man anymore”. Don Cocom then asked in Spanish about this, and the woman explained the man had lost his job and they couldn’t afford to pay for a zinc roof they had just bought. Don Cocom did end up giving the woman some Man Vine, but then told her to give her husband a medicinal bath and conduct a few prayers and incense rituals to get the depressive spirit out so her bed could again have more uses than sleep.
Don Cocom emphasizes the fact that your home, and not the sterility of a hospital, is the place for healing. He told me that, “In the hospital you are like a caged animal, with machines taking care of you. When you are with your family, they are there helping you to get better, so you have their health to bring you back to yours.” He posses a simple wisdom that is uncomplicated because he has all he needs in life: a home, a family, and an entire rainforest full of his cultural past and gifts from plants. His understanding of the networking that occurs between humanity and the land is what he thrives off of, and he helps other people thrive because of it.
Despite the wealth of knowledge and healing possessed by men of this profession, Don Cocom is one of the last curanderos in Belize. Over the years the majority of this knowledge has been forgotten or deemed untrue by Mayan society, due to their loss of interest because of assimilation into the modernized cultures surrounding them. He is even met with opposition: a prominent ethnobotanist, researching the medicinal powers of Belize’s plants, learned from him and then tried to shut his practice down so she could gain his profit in addition to hers; this is called bio-piracy. But Don Cocom will smile when he tells this story, because he is still here, healing and making people whole.
He is 82 years old and still firey, but once he moves on to Xibalba, the Mayan afterlife, he will have taken with him many of the secrets of the Maya healers. There is not another curandero in this region, and his Mayan patients will have no choice but to go see doctors who know little of their families and nothing about their spirituality.
This is why I am learning what I can from him now, so that Don Cocom’s knowledge won’t hide below the roots of his plants once he is gone. Luckily, a local boy has taken interest as well and is learning much more in hopes that one day he too will become a healer. Don Cocom’s legacy and the Mayan way of healing rests with him, and with those who have been most touched by his gentle hands and open heart-in this way his knowledge will not be forgotten.
