La Partera / The Midwife / The Medicine Woman

Weather used to be banal watercooler talk. Now it can be as divisive a topic as faith. I was dreading the weather I would suffer in Guatemala earlier this month. Central America in July? What was I thinking? But I landed on a Sunday afternoon and walked out to meet a cool seventy degree breeze. It was not at all what I had expected, and you’d think I would be used to that by now, but no. I was happily surprised.

Guatemala City is not a tourist destination. Big buildings, lots of traffic, smog, it is another city. What stands out is the kindness of the people, not overt or overwhelming, simply approachable and unbothered by a traveler’s questions.

I was there with the Global Acupuncture Project. They teach acupuncture to medical professionals around the world. The program started 25 years ago in Uganda, where they continue to instruct primarily medical doctors on the use of acupuncture for those living with HIV. Their program in Mexico began following outreach from a midwifery institute that sought an acupuncture program for its students. Next came a call from a birthing clinic in Guatemala, where the program continues to focus on acupuncture education for midwives or parteras.

It was an amazing group of women, each woman carried a wealth of knowledge and experience from cities and towns of both Guatemala and El Salvador. Some were second or third generation parteras, and a few also came from lineages of spirit healers.

In that mix of personalities, the days were long yet peaceful. But, there is always one voice in any room that is louder than the others, and that one belonged to one of the parteras from El Salvador. She was bold, smart, and easily one of the more fascinating people in the world, let alone in the room. Her life experiences could fill a doorstop of a novel and leave you wanting a sequel, and like many of the older women in the room, she had personal stories of surviving war and witnessing acts of genocide. She, like so many we met, was eager to talk all about the current United States of America.

Of all the themes our conversations explored, it was one of her simpler stories that stuck with me. This partera had trained for several years to lead temazcals, traditional sweat ceremonies which use herbs, rocks, and heat to guide someone through a spiritual experience. When she was finally granted an opportunity to study under the shaman she had chosen, she was asked to spend one year seeking the plants and the rocks for her own temazcal. The process of finding the plants and rocks was one of reflection so she could choose what she thought needed with her while facing herself in the temazcal, all of herself, including the hidden, forgotten, rejected pieces. She had to be patient, find the right cuttings and grow the plants to a healthy size.

“And that’s what the problem is, Kari,” she said, “people think they can face the edge of death without doing any work. So they go in, unprepared, and come out even crazier than before.”

She criticised the shamans who take people, mostly foreigners, on what should be a sacred path when they know they are not ready for it. Like any industry, shamanism has its interpersonal conflicts, this being one of them.

It’s a perfect storm: the shaman who puts a pin in his ethics for capital, a human being desperately looking for something they are not ready to find, a sweltering hotbox of unfamiliar rocks and foliage. No one is prepared to meet the demons they hardly knew were there, and the only way to ready ourselves for them is to find the things that make us stronger, assuming we know where or how to begin. It’s a slow process, grueling even, and it cannot be rushed, even in its urgency. It is the practice of knowing you want change but having to have the right tools to make it happen.

It reminded me of how wily life’s magic can be, and how fickle it is. One minute the world is floating, and the next it’s crashing, always in flux.

And yet, there we were, we “teachers” with these incredible women, living a moment, holding the weight of our stories, taking breaks to shoot the breeze. These women, who had seen the worst of people, welcome new life into this world, certain it still has good left in it for anyone who will forage for it.

Kari Napoli: “You can feel better. “Better” is different for everyone. Better happens when you are ready. Take your time.”

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