6-22-08 – Esmeraldas, Ecuador
Delfina Torres de Concha Hospital is the only public (free) hospital in a city of a couple hundred thousand. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your take) it borders the roughest neighborhood in town, which translates into a lot of drugs (yesterday: a 1-year old in a cocaine haze) and violence (last week: a couple walking along the shore at 4:30 in the afternoon - she was raped first, he second). Although it might not seem to be an obvious connection, the hospital works closely with the police, who bring in a good share of patient flow. They tell me it’s best to have money when you’re robbed, because then you just get beat down; it’s worse not to have anything, because you’re killed for the inconvenience. They were speaking from experience.
But naturally, the longer I work, the more people I get to know, which is filling itself in as a small security buffer. For example, last week I was in the streets walking along when a bus passed by. Through an open window, a dude started whistling at me. “Jack ass,” I thought, and kept walking. But the dude got off at the next stop and accosted me. His profile fit that of the stereotypical college football defensive lineman, and I was scared. What did he want? I didn’t have money in my pocket. It turned out he just wanted to say hi; last week someone slashed his shoulder with a machete, just lateral to where the shoulder meets up with the neck. I helped sew his trapezius together and put a drain in his back to give the leakage a way out. His street clothes through me for a loop – that’s all. He was a pleasant chap.
Last week in a hole-in-the-wall joint behind the hospital overlooking the ghetto I saw a different healing – a procedure on the soul, performed in a church with plastic chairs, cement floors and not much else. When I got there, the clergy was praying up front and everyone else, numbering about 20, were on their knees doing their own thing – so I too sat down and started praying, not really sure what was happening. But then the church dude, with the front doors wide open, started praying against the drug addicts, crooks, thieves, prostitutes and children of the devil – implication being those in the neighborhood just below who might catch a trail of his voice through the speakers pointing in their direction. And the church started to fill, people came in off the streets, and it got busy as a beehive.
Church dude started praying for individual people, putting two fingers on their chest and blasting them with energized words. Sometimes the people would spin – faster and faster and faster until they were out of control. And as if it was an every day thing to turn people into tipsy turveys, the regular attendees facilitated the spinning by pulling aside chairs to make room for the spinners, who bounced around between innocent people. One lady hit me a couple of times, so I moved to the wall and got low to the ground where it was safe. Some of the spinners screamed things until they passed out. Most of them were caught by the regular attendees, but one lady started spinning out of turn (there was a line of people waiting to get passed out, and she hadn’t yet been prayed for – she just started spinning on her own) – so there wasn’t anyone to catch her, and when she passed out – BAM – knocked her noggin on the hard floor. Another church dude raced over – I thought he was going to see if she was okay, but he just started praying for her – perhaps to make up for lost time.
By then, the guy up front had changed tactics and was now putting people into convulsions. Could this be real? But sure enough, person after person stood in front of him, got blasted with prayer and tweaked out on the floor - and then seemed to be healed, or at least stilled, like a spirit-suction device sucked out the bad living inside of them. Sometimes the guy up front wiped a special oil on the patients’ foreheads, other times he poured water on them – I couldn’t figure out when each was called for. He did use a lot of sound effects through the microphone, though – beat-boxed bullet sounds when he touched people, or swooshing noises for the pouring of the water bottle.
In the end I’m not sure what I saw – a hypnotist, a man of God, a hidden cultural phenomenon? – but by the service’s close the beehive was quiet, people were healed, and something had changed. Simply put, “the photographer knows what he has witnessed, but not what it means” - Louis Schillinger. "Blood and guts". New York Times book report 5/25/2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/books/review/Schillinger-t.html?scp=1&sq=blood%20and%20guts&st=cse
Delfina Torres de Concha Hospital is the only public (free) hospital in a city of a couple hundred thousand. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your take) it borders the roughest neighborhood in town, which translates into a lot of drugs (yesterday: a 1-year old in a cocaine haze) and violence (last week: a couple walking along the shore at 4:30 in the afternoon - she was raped first, he second). Although it might not seem to be an obvious connection, the hospital works closely with the police, who bring in a good share of patient flow. They tell me it’s best to have money when you’re robbed, because then you just get beat down; it’s worse not to have anything, because you’re killed for the inconvenience. They were speaking from experience.But naturally, the longer I work, the more people I get to know, which is filling itself in as a small security buffer. For example, last week I was in the streets walking along when a bus passed by. Through an open window, a dude started whistling at me. “Jack ass,” I thought, and kept walking. But the dude got off at the next stop and accosted me. His profile fit that of the stereotypical college football defensive lineman, and I was scared. What did he want? I didn’t have money in my pocket. It turned out he just wanted to say hi; last week someone slashed his shoulder with a machete, just lateral to where the shoulder meets up with the neck. I helped sew his trapezius together and put a drain in his back to give the leakage a way out. His street clothes through me for a loop – that’s all. He was a pleasant chap.
Last week in a hole-in-the-wall joint behind the hospital overlooking the ghetto I saw a different healing – a procedure on the soul, performed in a church with plastic chairs, cement floors and not much else. When I got there, the clergy was praying up front and everyone else, numbering about 20, were on their knees doing their own thing – so I too sat down and started praying, not really sure what was happening. But then the church dude, with the front doors wide open, started praying against the drug addicts, crooks, thieves, prostitutes and children of the devil – implication being those in the neighborhood just below who might catch a trail of his voice through the speakers pointing in their direction. And the church started to fill, people came in off the streets, and it got busy as a beehive.
Church dude started praying for individual people, putting two fingers on their chest and blasting them with energized words. Sometimes the people would spin – faster and faster and faster until they were out of control. And as if it was an every day thing to turn people into tipsy turveys, the regular attendees facilitated the spinning by pulling aside chairs to make room for the spinners, who bounced around between innocent people. One lady hit me a couple of times, so I moved to the wall and got low to the ground where it was safe. Some of the spinners screamed things until they passed out. Most of them were caught by the regular attendees, but one lady started spinning out of turn (there was a line of people waiting to get passed out, and she hadn’t yet been prayed for – she just started spinning on her own) – so there wasn’t anyone to catch her, and when she passed out – BAM – knocked her noggin on the hard floor. Another church dude raced over – I thought he was going to see if she was okay, but he just started praying for her – perhaps to make up for lost time.
By then, the guy up front had changed tactics and was now putting people into convulsions. Could this be real? But sure enough, person after person stood in front of him, got blasted with prayer and tweaked out on the floor - and then seemed to be healed, or at least stilled, like a spirit-suction device sucked out the bad living inside of them. Sometimes the guy up front wiped a special oil on the patients’ foreheads, other times he poured water on them – I couldn’t figure out when each was called for. He did use a lot of sound effects through the microphone, though – beat-boxed bullet sounds when he touched people, or swooshing noises for the pouring of the water bottle.
In the end I’m not sure what I saw – a hypnotist, a man of God, a hidden cultural phenomenon? – but by the service’s close the beehive was quiet, people were healed, and something had changed. Simply put, “the photographer knows what he has witnessed, but not what it means” - Louis Schillinger. "Blood and guts". New York Times book report 5/25/2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/books/review/Schillinger-t.html?scp=1&sq=blood%20and%20guts&st=cse
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