I avoid the medical profession on the principal that doctors always seem to find something wrong me when I go to see them, and I’m perfectly well when I don’t. We treat minor physical malfunctions ourselves. My garden is punctuated with plants to treat everything from fever to wasp stings and mental sluggishness, the pantry is lined with jars of infused oils and home-made tinctures.
Wayan is delighted with this do-it-yourself attitude and constantly adds to our pharmacopoeia. When I get a cold, she plasters me in pungent pastes and presents me with slimy green drinks. When she starts to sniffle, I bombard her with Vitamin C and Echinacea. It all seems to work.
In between home remedies and the standard medical profession lies the gray area of what my father used to call the ‘Snake Oil Men’. For centuries, if not millennia, this subculture has sold mysterious patent medicines for what seem to be mankind’s three major embarrassments: baldness, haemorrhoids and sexual dysfunction.
The Javanese equivalent of Viagra was recently brought to my attention during an Indonesian language lesson. It was a particularly grueling class in which our young teacher was trying hard to help us understand the tricky verb prefixes. We had just read a simple story about bus schedules when one of her more unruly students pulled out a recent copy of the Bali Post and asked her to translate an ad. It featured a photo of a grim looking granny and some text with exclamation marks.
Ketut welcomed alternative learning tools and encouraged lively discussions about all kinds of things. On this occasion she shifted seamlessly from transitive verbs to penile enhancement as she helped us put our newly acquired language skills to use.
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Memperbesar…. to make bigger. Memperpanjang… to make longer.” Those damn verb prefixes were starting to pay off. “Sampai 15 - 20 cm.” Penny pulled a tape measure from her purse; Americans still think in inches. “Ejakulasi dini… the only thing that is early in Indonesia,” explained Ketut. This was a lot more engaging than bus schedules. “This medicine is effective for all religions. Free sample!” Impotensi was clear, but what was dll? There were several of these ads, all with photos of unsmiling men and women which were probably meant to be reassuring. Prices ranged from Rp 400,000 to 600,000.
A whole new world was opening up. We scanned the other pages, alerted to what was evidently a major industry. Quite a lot of advertising rupiah were dedicated to this very subject. Here was another big ad for Renaissance Oil, Formula Special for Men, Imported, featuring a large picture of a charging bull. It promised the usual improvements to dimensions and performance. (“Snake Oil,” I could hear my father snort.) So did Cina Oil, the ad for which included quite a few words that were not in the dictionary and some that were ambivalent. Kencing, for instance, can mean urine, kidney stones, blood in the urine, sexual intercourse or to be urinated upon. Indonesian can be a very tricky language, and you’d want to be sure of your prefixes before you embarked on a discussion of this nature.
When I got home I showed the ad to Wayan and Nyoman, who viewed it with casual interest. “Oh yes, I’ve seen this on the television.” Good grief. “It’s usual for rich people, but not for Balinese,“ Wayan enlightened me.
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These people just want money,” said Nyoman. “They promise, but it’s just big talk, not true. It’s for the Javanese. If the Balinese have this problem, they go to the dukun and pay Rp 10,000.” Of course, the Balinese had to have the last word and get a better price as well.
(All this thinking had made me tired and I went to lie down. When I woke up, I found that Wayan had finished all my homework about bus schedules. “We learn this in elementary school,” she explained kindly.)
For stress and depression, I swear by a visit to Cokorda Rai. A friend took me to see him after a terrifying house fire left me depressed and off balance, a disagreeable condition later diagnosed as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I certainly felt out of order. The wise old man looked at me, then at the air around me, then palpated my skull rather urgently. After that I lay down on a woven mat as he took a sharpened twig and poked under my toes. “Heart, liver, spleen,” he murmured as he prodded. There was no discomfort. “Kidneys, lungs…” Suddenly I arched my back and squealed in pain. “Ah,” he intoned. “The Story Body is sick.”
It was interesting to learn that the mind was considered a physical organ like any other and to be found on the same menu, so to speak. Western medicine puts them in completely different restaurants. But Cok Rai said, “Your mind is frightening your body. And…” he glanced around my head, “… there are tears in your aura; I can see the colors leaking out. I will fix it.” And he did. A few minutes later when he poked the same spot with the pointed stick, there was no pain at all. I immediately felt much better, and was quickly back to normal. I’ve taken several people to see him since then, all with the same results. A major mental tune-up with no medication, all for Rp 30,000. (“Expensive,” points out Wayan. “Cheaper for Balinese.”)
So we try a little of this, a little of that. Working in the garden one day when I had houseguests, Nyoman was stung by a scorpion and we brought together the accumulated wisdom of our various cultures to treat him. Whether it was the paste of crushed limestone, the urine, the antihistamine, the ice or the Reiki, within an hour the pain and swelling had disappeared. Or maybe it was the Snake Oil….
