The village...Shaman?

August 27th, 2009: Today we went to see an habitual drug user who labeled himself as a Shaman. I suppose it is much better than labeling himself as an addict. According to an ancient 1998 Oxford paperback dictionary, a Shaman is someone who is a witch-doctor or priest claiming to communicate with gods, etc. Yes, it is highly probable that the Shaman is going to see and communicate with things like fictitious spirits and pink elephants due to the miniscule amount of healthy brain cells he has left from drinking the hallucinogenic liquid cocktail known as ayawaska for the past 20 or so years.

I passed on the opportunity to try a bottle of this concoction which he was conveniently selling out of his hut. I personally don’t want to drink anything that you must expect to throw up from and could possibly cause you to involuntarily defecate on yourself – I must also keep in mind that the underwear I am now wearing needs to last me a couple of more days.

But, if I truly wanted to vomit and be known as poo-poo pants, I could have accomplish this for a low price of $0.00, by simply lifting up his mothers dress – I would then obviously immediately vomit anything I might have eaten in the past few days and then quickly get the shit beat out of me by her toothless husband.

When it was time to pay the Shaman his $2.00 fee for seeing him in his getup and hearing him say something in Spanish during his ritual - I handed over my money to a woman to pass on to the young entrepreneur. I hope he didn’t think that I skipped out on what I owed him…which could potentially result in him putting some sort of curse on me, as he sat near his homemade beaded necklaces and bracelets that were for sale.

After leaving, nobody that I talked to on our boat really believed in his abilities to place curses on people. I then asked, “If you don’t believe, could you put a curse on your mother and not think twice about it?” – this…they wouldn’t do.