The Kambô Frog and I—A Short Trip To Peru, Part 6

Stephan and I have been caught in a pandemic lockdown at a Peruvian Amazon lodge. The two-week quarantine order has been extended three times. I’ve run out of antidepressants and been sick during the six weeks we've waited to go home to our sailboat in Ecuador.

SV Hanalei’s Ecuadorian papers have just expired. We can’t extend her temporary import unless we’re in country, but the border is still closed. It’s time to evacuate to the U.S.

Before we go, I have a date to meet The Frog.

The Giant Monkey Frog, Phyllomedusa bicolor. (C. Donachie photo)

The knock on my door isn’t the police this time, but still induces apprehension.

It's Kambô time.

Kambô is a traditional Amazon medicine used, among other things, to strengthen the immune system.

Charlotte Donachie, an advanced Kambô practitioner who’s quarantined with us at Wasaí, has arrived.

The pandemic interrupted Charlie's Amazon retreat, so she has all her tools with her. Her arms are wrapped around a wooden box with a couple of bottles balanced on top. 

Behind her pleasant greeting I sense she’s reading my face, gauging my state of mind. 

Which at the moment is subdued excitement peppered with anxiety.

She deposits the box on our hotel desk and unpacks.

First, she pulls out a patterned mauve and green textile. She says the tapestry was woven by Shipibo, indigenous Peruvian people that use Ayahuasca, the plant medicine that brought her to Kambô.

She calls the tapestry her shamanic altar, a place for sacred and meaningful objects.

I watch her bring forth one peculiar item after another like a New Age Mary Poppins. Incense. Rattles. Salve. A feather. Some kind of tightly packed and rolled tobacco. A pipe. A bowl of sage.

Is she planning to use all of these?

A terra cotta frog with a hole drilled through its mouth holds a stick. She says it is a musical instrument. The stick, played along its back, produces a froglike sound. More frogs carved of stone and wood join the first.

Each goes to its designated place.

Kambô tools. (C. Donachie photo)

I resist the impulse to touch everything. Clearly, these are sacred tools. 

I think.

In truth, I’m not sure what I think. My everyday life at sea is straightforward. A boat. Sails. Sheets. My tools are for movement, navigation, and safety. Scientifically proven. We don’t have woo-woo rituals and superstitions.

Unless you count touching wood, equator-crossing ceremonies, and never leaving Friday on a passage. 

I’m usually an observer of other cultures, not a participant. Suspending disbelief doesn’t mean I embrace a new paradigm.

So why am I doing this? 

Illness brought home my vulnerability to virus. I want to boost my immune system before we spend days traveling with strangers.

According to Charlie, when our immune system is low, our mental, emotional and physical bodies are susceptible to energetic parasites, or entities. These parasites attach to energetic/ emotional and mental bodies and can ramp up negative emotions. 

It seems as good an explanation of depression as my doctor’s.

Next comes the Kambô stick. The flat, two-by-four inch strip of bamboo is steeped in the secretions of the Giant Monkey Frog, Phyllomedusa bicolor.

Charlie sits on the floor with me, as down to earth as though she’s in an Amazon hut, not a quarantine hotel room. She matter-of-factly explains the frog’s secretions contain peptides–chains of amino acids–that will enter my lymphatic system.

She attributes intelligence to these amino acids. The frog, she says, will enter and scan the body, zero in on toxins, seek and destroy pockets of them. Its entry route involves removing a top layer of skin by means of pencil tip-sized burns, then applying the secretions.

After a few minutes, I should expect a rush of blood, a rapid heart rate, then purging.

Purges take many forms. I could spit foam squeezed from my organs and deposited in the stomach. She warns that I may projectile vomit yellow or green. They’re colorful, the poisons that the body guards. Sweat is a powerful purge, too. Or it may take the form of diarrhea.  

When I visualize these possibilities, I imagine nothing good can come of them.

I should call this off.

Charlie asks how I am feeling. 

A jagged, acid-etched plug bobs on my stomach like a mine in wartime ocean. 

“Anxious,” I say.

She nods. “Perfectly normal.” 

We start with a chakra-cleansing meditation. Deep breathing relaxes me, calms my anxiety.

Charlie lights an antibiotic Nepalese incense stick and hands me a stone frog to hold. It’s cool to the touch, like an amphibian. She encourages me to set an intention–something I want to release or attract–for my work with the frog.

I think about attracting immunity, imperviousness to the virus, release from fear of the plague. I don’t yet see that these are in fact the same longing.

She lights the sage to smudge the room, wafts smoke around us purposefully.

My Western brain interrupts to wonder, Is it to clear the way and guide, like curling sweepers’ brooms on ice? Or flush out prey as hunting dogs do game? 

I’m not surprised that my brain wants Western equivalents and cultural sense-makers. Amazonian shamans must know better metaphors.

Take a break, brain.

If the point is to purge toxins, who cares how it works? It’s not as though I understand the virus, either.

Charlie instructs me to start drinking water–the first of two liters–to give toxins a place to gather. She says they need to stay hydrated, not stuck to the stomach. Once the frog accomplishes its mission, we don’t want the detritus to reattach. 

The water acts as bouncer. Once the host is done with its unwanted guests, it helps them make a quick exit.

So much for quieting my Western brain.

Kambô tools. (C. Donachie photo)

Now we get down to business.  

She singes five points down my right ankle with the incense. Each stings like a tiny campfire ember. The column ends above the tattoo I got in Papeete with my friend, Barb. The tattoo hurt more. Waxing hurts more.

So far, so good.

She reiterates Kambô’s effects: rapid heart rate, flushing, purging. 

I nod like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

At least she didn't say hallucination.

Charlie dips the bamboo stick into a bowl of water. She’s focused on some inner world now, scraping one side with a pocket knife. Something seeps from the wet bamboo.

Frog poison.

With the knife’s tip, she fashions the secretions into five opaque dots like blobs of wood glue on a tongue depressor. 

She scrapes the first dot onto a test point to check my reaction.

I feel a slight gag reflex and the urge to spit, foreshadowers of the main event.

She applies another dot, repeating the process three times up the column of blisters. 

I already regret this whole idea.

Now we wait.

Advanced Kambô practitioner, Charlotte “Charlie” Donachie.

As my pulse rises, there’s no rising fire, no flushing. My stomach knuckles abruptly grip and tighten. I want to vomit. Black, radioactive silly putty thrown at my esophagus over and over makes valiant attempts to retch, but I don’t.

Please let me get this over with. Now. 

I’m overtaken by a look and feel of pure color, the chartreuse of Phyllomedusa bicolor. The frog is inside me.

Then I spit foam. After a half-century in my organs, toxins have been French-pressed into my gut, ready for dispersal.

I keep spitting.

Charlie tells me to continue drinking water. She encourages me to vomit.

I’ve done the same with seasick crew, “You’ll feel better after you puke.”

I won’t do that again. Please make it stop.

She lights mapacho and blows the tobacco smoke over me. If anything should make me vomit, that would.

It doesn’t.

Even the bulimic’s trick of sticking fingers down my throat doesn’t work.

Charlie’s throat is making its own music, breath sounds that she later tells me are mostly involuntary, part of the movement of energy.

As far as I can tell, my energy does not move.

My bowels seem to have other ideas, though . . . .

Next time, I’ll process Kambô's after effects on the three-day trip to Lima.

Fair Winds,

Christine

Do Tell!

Have you tried another culture’s folk medicine? What happened?