The cute family that we
live with here has an adorable little baby boy, he is about 3 ½ to 4 months old
now. I guess he has been acting kind of
sick and they think it is because some evil spirits are bothering him. Everyone knows the obvious thing to do when
you are sick…. I mean having evil spirits bother you, is to go visit a magic
medicine man! So a bunch of us wanted to
go with and see this guy and what he would do.
It was really interesting to watch him work. One of the main things that he does is make mantras? (supposedly that's what they are called) These are magic spells that are written on a tiny piece of paper, rolled up,
and then placed inside a tiny capsule which is then tied around your neck, arm,
or ankle.
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| Close up of my mantra |
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| Me wearing my mantra and one of my new friends, Gieva! |
So we watched this magic Muslim medicine man do his work
on a couple of people and then Sailaja (who came with us) said that we could
all try it too! I wasn’t so sure that I
wanted to do it because at one part of the ritual or whatever it was that he
was doing, he would pour some water into a little golden bowl and pour it into
your mouth. I didn’t want to drink the
water in case it was bad for us and a couple of the other girls questioned it
too but YOLO! One of the girls said YOLO! and reminded us that we would probably never have an opportunity like this again
so… that decided it! We took turns
sitting on the ground of his little hut in front of him so he could bless us
and who knows what else. Haha I couldn’t understand anything he was saying and
had no idea what he was doing so I couldn’t really tell you what happened. He made each of us our own little mantras,
blessed us, put some sort of medicine on our necks, and slapped water across
our faces hahaha! It was super funny to
watch him pour some water from the little gold bowl into his hand, whisper some
things to it, and then just splat it across each girl’s face! Then he would pour the rest of the water in
the bowl into our mouths… lovely. I took
some pictures of Raju, the baby’s father, while the magic man was working on
him, but sadly didn’t get any other pictures.
I did get the whole thing on video when I was doing it though! I just don’t know how to post it so sorry!
Important lesson sadly
learned: Don’t drink any water outside of the house! Our house has fresh water that’s safe delivered
for us to drink. Any other water (with
the exception of bottled water) is most likely bad for us to drink. So the water that I drank from the “medicine
man” made me super sick! It was super
sweet though because the next morning the cooks made me French toast for
breakfast!!! They knew I liked it and
that it would probably be better for my stomach to eat something that was
familiar and not spicy. How sweet! They
take such good care of us.
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