Healing Herb Flagellation in Cuenca

Jan. 26-27
Cuenca, Ecuador

Cuenca lacks the extreme sports of Banos but it does make up for it with beautiful or nice Colonial and modern neighborhoods. The city of five-hundred thousand people is nestled within green forested and grassy hills and low ranges of mountains. The `Touristica` bus tour, embarking from in front of the`old' church on the main plaza, is well recommended to get a sense of the variety of topography and neighborhoods Cuenca offers. The one stop of the guided tour was the view point from Turin Hill. Cuenca could be Tuscan, Roman or Californian with the red tiled roofs and domed churchs. Fifty-two Catholic churches and still counting. The main plaza, Park Calderon´ has five century- old Norfolk Island Pines at its center, tiled walks, ornate cast-iron-edged planting beds, fountains, and plants from around the world- exceedingly possible in this climate! The altitude is lower and warmer than Banos, and California Pepper trees and giant varegated Agave are quite common here. The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, right on the main plaza, was built in 1885 of brick with marble insets, and is the ´new´church on the plaza. It has some beautiful baby-blue tiled domes, although the two squat towers on either side of the entrance unfortunately were not engineered correctly and weren´t able to support the origonally designed spires. Morman Temples in southern Idaho can settle for fiber-glass towers, but then Mormonism is a new religion as religions go, not bound by two, or five-thousand year-old traditions. Across the plaza is the first and óld´ el Sagrario church built in 1557 by the Spaniards , the now deconsecrated and repurposed as a museum.

Inside and to the back of the basilica of Immaculate Conception, is a giant, gilded, wood-carved, Baroque-Rococo temple-alter, four spiraled columns supporting a gilded-arched-tracery of a half-dome, with angels on the impediments of the two sides and a crucifix a Jesus in the middle. The gold and shine is impressive, but as always I think of all the indigenous slaves who died very young, and worked under horrible conditions to mine that gold. Maybe fiberglass and gold spray makes sense? You gotta give those practical Mormons credit.

Cuenca, like Quito, much of Mexico and Central America, and probably much of South America, suffers from poor air quality in the city center, and the routes literally surround the historic area. The modern area has wider more open streets so is less affected. Old decrepid buses burn the blackest, crudest, most unprocessed fuels on narrow , closed-in colonial streets. That, plus the affects of `eternal spring` and therefore high pollen counts, sent me to the Pharmacist where I was confronted with a cultural dilemma. Many things, bulk food in the markets, clothes, artensenias, even taxi fares one barters for. Barter is king in Central and South America. Does one barter with the Pharmacist when he wants a US dollar for a tiny Claratin tablet? No discount for eight tabs? Especially after he smiled, should I barter? I said thank you, and paid the bill.


The short indigenous women, most not reaching five feet, are descendants of the Inca -who lived here for less than a century, or the Canari- who have lived in this area for thousands of years, can be seen about the city or in small towns in the highlands. The women wear the ´Dick Tracey- Fedora` banded felt hats; short or tall palm fiber Panama hats of yellow or white. Pleated bright skirts. Flat long dark-blue skirts like many of the Guatemalan Mayan skirts; Brightly colored skirts and blouses with embroidered edges. They sell all forms of greens or crafts, near or in the market, and on the streets. .All sundry of potatoes, including small pale yellow and pink spotted ´soup´potatoes called ´Melloco´ (Me-yoe-koe) . Cooking herbs, and flowers and vegetables. The school kids look very indigenous : short, dark and asian. They could be Oaxacan Mexican Indigenous.

I love to wander through the main market, it is such a bombastic visual and olfactory experience! The meat market presented chopped off legs of pigs , hoves intact, neatly stacked like strange Incan clubs. Severed organs or appendages of various beasts, fowl and fish piled absently or stacked carefully; or entire butchered creatures. Explosions of tropical and temperate flowers; torch flower, Haleconia, bird of paradise, hibiscus, mums, roses, pansies, grey aromatic santolina . Stalls with iron products, welded hoops, files, rings, knives, tools with ancient little vendedero-men in stylish hats moving at a snails pace. Clothing, shoes, leather good, saddles and Caballero products. Tropical and temperate fruits neatly pyramided, from cherries and plums to star fruit, papaya, limes and more indigenous fare.´ . Curative and healing herbs you flagellate the flesh with. One young man was shirtless, while a short, squarish, aproned, pig-tailed woman beat his back to red welts with a stack of greens. Another woman in a black skirt and red sweater flagellated, albeit in a more gentle fashion, a clothed baby while her mother held her.

At the hostal in Medallin Columbia, I met a Swiss-German junkie (former?) and drug addict, who had spent a week up in the hills with a local shaman that he had ´carefully shopped for´.
´´ You kant havv yust eeny schamahn. Zare arre goot schaamahns andt badt onez. ´´ he informed me, this sweet but battered young Swiss guy- still suffering from a week of diareha. In the hills, he fasted, and sweated in a crude indigenous´lodge´. He experienced a similar herb ´flagellation-treatment´ which welted and stung the flesh but presumably drew the evil spirtis from the body and soul; he drank halluncinagenic drinks that in him induced terror and wailing , images of the brutality of war, dismemberment and carnage- he who he claimed never cryed, had no fear and few emotions. He wailed for hours, calling for the shaman who eventually came when he felt the young man was ´ready´. He explained his psychic hole, spritual emptiness and existential frustration had been as wide and deep as a volcano. Drug treatment facilities, AA programs, councelers and phsycologists are well aquainted with this existential ´hole´ and lack of meaning and purpose. The proverbial absence of Victor Frankl`s `Why `` .
´´ Zhiss ees za problahmn vith addictschun. Zhiss houle! Zhiss ees vhy I drink andt doo zah druggs. ´´ He felt at least for the moment `neutral`, the hungry consumptive-hole gone.
´Good luck mi amigo!´ Guess we must all maintain our temples, be they spiritual or of twenty-four-carot gold or spray-painted fiber-glass.
´ Do you have anything in the way of a Martha Stewart healing herb and spiritual cleanse? Something tasteful, understated, W.A.S.P. `y and not too extreme? Hold the psycadelics please.´ Spicy soup it was. ( Although I wish I would have specifically stated NOT the colon cleanse!)

Abrazos
Esteban