February 19th, 2013. I am going to relay this with my best effort of translating the idea as it was explained to me in Spanish, but I make no promises and I truly hope I don’t butcher this and offend anyone.
I came home from training and found my host parents picking various plants on the side of the road. They said that baby Ayllen was in a very bad mood and had “mal aire”, which directly translates to bad air, and she needs these herbs. I had no idea what this meant and thought that she was just guessing at Ayllen’s emotions like we usually do. (We usually come up with crazy reasons for her grumpiness, like she’s been working really hard all day at being a baby and no one understands her, etc.) But no, my host mom explains, she is “ojeada”, which means that people have been looking at her with bad thoughts and have given her this mal aire. They can tell that this is what has happened because she has been in a bad mood all day and does not want to play or eat. The only solution, Sonia explained, is to rub an egg (whole, uncracked) all over her body and then bathe her in these herbs and give her tea from the herbs. (…ok… makes sense… I thought to myself) So I watched this process in awe. She used the egg to draw crosses on each part of the baby’s body as she whispered something (which I assume were prayers), the baby bathed in this very bitter herb bath, which made the whole house smell like a funky hippie candle shop, and the baby drank the yucky tea. Sonia then cracked the egg into a glass and said that the bubbles rising from the egg were the bad air. She said she can not throw out the egg or the bathwater or take the baby out of the house until the next day at noon.
One of the most interesting things I’ve seen in Ecuador
All my love,
Chels
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