On the 28th of February 2001, Buck and Luciene moved to the Amazon Basin of Brazil. We lived in Macapá, right on the equator. Why would a web designer give up his career and take his family from their comfortable life in Columbus, Ohio, USA, to live on the Amazon River? We came with a vision to save the Amazon, to tell people about Jesus, and plant a Vineyard church. We have planted a church, and we are turning it over to the national leaders, heading back to the States in Sept. 2009.

 
“It’s an ancient Amazon Indian cure,” he told me, as if that would make the medicine easier to swallow. It was quite possibly the nastiest medicine I have ever had. From the deep red color, it was obvious that Urucum was one of the main ingredients, but there is also some oil, maybe some eucalyptus or some copaiba oil or both. Urucum is the plant that the Amazon Indians get the red paint from, the paint that National Geographic type photographers like to show, the red matted hair, and the red face. Makes a great picture, really. But does it also make a great medicine?

“I can’t tell you what is in it, because that would take away its effect, and it wouldn’t heal you,” he said, and I just looked at him. What kind of baloney is that? If I tell you the ingredients it won’t cure you? It is pure poppycock of course. If he had been a little more honest, perhaps he would have said that he couldn’t tell me the ingredients, because then I could make it myself, and wouldn’t pay him his very high fee as the resident “holy man healer” with the secret Indian cures.

It would be easy to dismiss these types of things, and give no credence to them at all. But I have learned that not all that sounds like nonsense really is. Let me give you one example. Amapa is known for its shrimp, and for it’s Açai, which they will often eat together. Here in Amapa, there are huge shrimp known as Pitu, that are really like small lobsters, and it is customary to eat them with Açai, which is a native fruit that the Brazilians make a drink of that is a staple of life here, and most foreigners hate. (Just for the record, I love Açai.) Here, in the land of the shrimp and the home of the Açai , it is common knowledge that if you have a sore throat, you don’t eat shrimp. You just wouldn’t think of it, because it would inflame your throat.

I, in my North American arrogance, dismissed it as a wives tale. But you know what? I have found that the Brazilians are right, when I have a sore throat, and I eat shrimp, it gets worse, it really does inflame it, and I really should avoid it. I have seen, through my own experience, that this is true, and now I at least make the decision with the information I need. Is it worth it to me to eat this marvelous shrimp, knowing that my throat will get worse? Usually the answer is yes, since I really like shrimp. J

So, I have learned not to outright dismiss something just because my North American ears haven’t heard it before. On the other hand, I have heard some things that I still think are just wives tales. For example, there is a belief that if you eat mango and drink milk at the same time, you would die. As soon as I heard it, I put it to the test, and ate mangos and drank milk, and I am still here to talk about it. “Well, it has to be pure cow’s milk” was the explanation that I got. Then I saw on TV a couple of years ago that this was something that the slave owners told the slaves so that they wouldn’t eat all the crops, which sounds like a much more plausible explanation to me.

I am looking at this neighborhood natural healer with a certain amount of healthy skepticism, and I think he sees it. He disappears into his yellow and blue wooden house, and returns with an old yellowed badge, which he proudly hands me with yellow and blue specked hands. The aged and yellowing badge declares him an employee of IEPA, a Brazilian organization which does research on plants and natural cures. The badge doesn’t say what his job was of course, I mean, he could have been the janitor for all I know, but it does give some air of official “scientific” legitimacy to the affair. He tells me that he had been an employee for 15 years, that he had been doing research, that he helped raise that organization up from nothing and then got kicked out because of political affiliation, and starts rattling off some scientific names of plants to impress me with his knowledge. It’s all plausible enough to be true, but then if you are going to tell a story to convince a new sucker, I mean patient, to give you their hard earned money, you’d better have a convincing story, right? So it doesn’t prove anything that his story seems plausible, or that it could be true.

And why am I there in the first place, staring at this little heavy guy with the paint drips all over his hands and shirt, and a faint odor of thinner, someone who doesn’t look anything like a doctor and is obviously midway in some household painting project? We had waited, as a child ran to call him, and he must have tried to clean some of the paint off before coming out and entering into the separate little building on the front corner of his property that serves as his center of healing. Bottles filled with various potions and medicines lined the shelves, plants hung drying, and bags of different plants and roots filled every available space. On the walls hung pictures of various saints, and crucifixes, and smiling haloed Jesus’. “What in the world am I doing here,” I thought?

I have tried the inhalers, I have tried the treatments of conventional doctors, and it hasn’t helped my asthma. My neighbor was worried about me, hearing me cough all the time now that the dry season is here and everyone is burning their weeds and clouds of smoke float slowly over the city like a weird fog because people are burning huge tracts of rainforest in surrounding areas, and the dust from our dirt road rolls by the house in huge billowing waves when the wind blows. The time of coughing has arrived.

So my neighbor, perhaps needing some peace and quiet, went and talked to this medicine man, and he said that he guaranteed that I would be healed. What have I got to loose besides the R$40 a bottle he is charging? I took the plunge, bought a bottle of the nasty red mystery Indian healing potion, and I am now taking it two times a day, and giving it to Raquel also.

You know what? Neither of us has had an asthma attack since we started taking it. Raquel even got a flu/cold kind of thing, and didn’t have any problems with asthma, which is unusual. We aren’t even half way done with our first bottle, and we are seeing results. He told us that we would need three bottles to be completely healed. If it heals me, and it heals my daughter, well, the R$40 for a bottle barely covers the price of an inhaler, and if we have no more asthma, it seems like a small investment, really.
posted by Eduardo Buck at Wednesday, October 05, 2005