Mama Dina

Dina has saved many lives and saved herself with plant medicines she adores and worships. She doesn’t charge for her service, curing conditions like epilepsy in two five-day dietas with reikia bark on a promise of a hundred soles and two chickens that never materialise. A hundred soles is twenty-five dollars. Considering she looks after the patient day and night, procures the remedies, washes and cooks, the only thing she is getting is a credit in heaven. ‘God will pay me,’ Dina says.

And because she can’t really survive healing people, she prefers to roam the jungle harvesting ayahuasca vine which she sells for peanuts to a local medicine exporter who makes himself a tidy fortune milking the jungle for all it’s worth. Three years she fell from some thirty meters high while cutting ayahuasca, bouncing off the branches and knocking all her teeth out. Family thought she was going to be dead. Instead, Dina insisted they take her to the chakra, where she spent a month paralysed in bed drinking renakilla bark preparation until one day she got up and started walking again.

We worked with Mama Dina for over two years now, dieting in the jungle, healing people and healing each other. It is a great privilege to know Dina and be a part of her family, to be always in her prayers. She gives us strength and inspiration. I refer you to Price of Medicine blog entry and Bottoms Up: Knowing the Cost of Your Brew for the stories I would otherwise be reiterating in sharing here. Thank you!