Rio Napo, Ecuador
Wednesday night offers the opportunity to visit an indigenous shaman for a cleansing ritual, which is supposed to rid the body of evil spirits and impurities. It will cost each person $5 to go, and the catch is that one person must be willing to be cleansed. Harvey, Jason (another Spanish student from Ohio), and I are the only ones who go, and Jason offers to be do the ritual.
Now, this shaman happens to live, very conveniently, a quarter of a mile downstream from the lodge, and shows up once a week - my guess is - to perform more rituals for tourists than for natives (who don´t even live in the close vicinity). I´m doubting the authenticity of this, and feeling awkward about the exploitative nature of viewing a ritual like this out of sheer curiosity, and I imagine the shaman does not particularly enjoy the position of taking money from tourists to give them an exotic little demonstration of what is, for his people, something ancient and sacred, but he accepts the lucrative opportunity as an unfortunate reality of contemporary life here.
...So we paddle through the night until we reach the wooden plank that leads up to the shaman´s hut. It is pitch black except for the stars. Dennis asks us to wait outside as he goes in to greet the shaman. We are signaled up to the hut. We have woken the shaman and his wife, who slept on a thin foam mat in the black night air of the hut.
The shaman shakes off the sleep, picks up a small bottle of something, swishes its contents around in his mouth for a moment and spits it out the door of the hut. His wife hands him a stick of dried leaves. He says he must wait 5 minutes for the medicine to take its effect. He sits on a log stump, and asks Jason to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of him. He asks Dennis to turn off the flashlight. Everything goes completely black. I think of the animals and tarantulas lurking around us in the night, I think of Dennis´machete that he carries everywhere, then I make peace with the blackness, as the deep and ancient drone of a tune rises up from the depths of the shaman´s throat. The song repeats itself rhythmically to the steady swishing of the dried leaves, as the shaman beats them back and forth against Jason´s head.
Drifting back on the dark water, I feel uneasy about the whole thing. I've satisfied my curiosity, but at what expense? So that I can touch the breath of the ancient rites in the black night air, this man comes to perform what he knows is a farce of a request, and in turn, earns the dollars he never needed before to get by in this strange new world. We briefly talk about what we thought of the whole thing. Floating in the canoe, we are drifting souls down a river where we don´t belong, but to which we are compelled by our thirst to know the secrets of the world. On a Wednesday night one week from now, and for many more after, another boat of curiosity-seekers will paddle off into the dark night to visit a hut for a shaman´s cleansing. On the way back, some of them will look up to the stars and search for their place in this complex web of cultural interaction. How are we different from the Texas Oil man on the airplane to El Coca who comes to take the black oil from beneath jungle?
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