Week 3 Martes

We take a trip to the museum of Mayan medicine, to see how indigenous people are really using those refrescos. It’ s a place on the edge of town, walking past a series of shacks offering everything from tacos to computer games.

It’s not so much a museum of the past as an explanation of how things work in the villages. The “Living Chapel”, is used by traditional healers that are part of the indigenous group that run the place, and contains blessed images of the saints. The healers use Coca Cola (and Fanta, it appears), eggs, live chickens, pine needles and candles as well as the local distilled spirit, posh, as part of the healing process.


I’ve seen the same things happening in the church at San Juan Chamula nearby, but you can’t take photos there, so these are the nearest we can get to showing what it is like. The museum also shows how many candles it is necessary to light in order to cure different illnesses. For vomiting and diarrhoea you would need fifty different candles in three different colours – enough to start a small conflagration.

Candles assume an entirely different significance here, and if you burn them in the evenings your Mexican friends are likely to assume you have become animist Catholic. They are sold in the market in huge bundles, in every size from about four foot to birthday cake candle size.

The museum also shows a video of a birth in one of the villages, complete with commentary from the local midwife. The women keep their skirts on to give birth, and are aided by their husbands, who may use special movements of their knees to speed things up (I wonder if they learn them at a kind of Tzotzil NCT class?).


After the birth the baby is rubbed with an egg to cleanse it, and the umbilical cord is tied with string (two knots for a boy, six for a girl) while the woman is ordered to rest and not carry heavy things for three months.

There is also a Mayan pharmacy on site, so we visit it to ask if they have anything to increase the production of a mother’s milk. The man doesn’t recommend SMA Gold, but instead suggests that I boil some dried fish up and then drink the liquid. We can’t work out whether he is serious or whether he really hates the gringos. I’m not that keen to try it out though.