Huasao

Last week in class we were studying Andean medicine, complete with a trip to the market to learn about medicinal plants and a whole day dedicated to the Coca leaf. We also learned a bit about magical-religious medicine, the kind that the shamans practice. Just reading and talking about it in class, though, was not enough. We had to get some real-life experience, so we took a bus down the road to Huasao, where we visited a shaman who reads people's fortunes in Coca leaves. Seriously. My classmate Jeanie, our teacher Libia, my housemate Timo and I made the trip. Jeanie went first, and the poor guy had enough trouble with Spanish as it was (his principal language being Quechua), let alone with crazy Anglo names. For the rest of the day she was known as "Shimmy". When the shaman tried to pronounce her full name, which could be a tongue-twister even for native English-speakers, I was struggling to keep from laughing and would have been fine had I not seen Libia next to me covering her face and shaking with laughter herself. I lost it, and I felt terrible; Libia is sure that he is never going to let her in again. I would love to show you a picture of the room we were in, the walls covered with still-life paintings and images of Catholic saints who overlook numerous ceremonies in which the shaman invokes Pachamana (Mother Earth), but I thought that taking a picture would be terribly disrespectful, especially once I had snickered at the shaman's rendition of Jeanie's full name. It was a good thing that Timo told him that he was from "Holanda" (Spanish for Holland) and not "Utrecht" (Dutch for impossible for a Spanish-speaker to pronounce). Following are a few pictures of Huasao houses.