The Bizarre Truth (33 page)

I saw these men crying and screaming. I saw blood and phlegm dripping from their noses—the same physical manifestation depicted in 20,000-year-old cave paintings discovered in other parts of Botswana. This tradition has continued on, essentially unchanged, for tens of thousands of years.

The healers lay hands on individual tribe members. They check a person’s physical health in almost the same way a Western doctor performs a rudimentary exploration, listening to your heart and lungs or looking into your eyes and ears. However, by laying their hands on you, the Juntwazee project a part of themselves into you and explore your spiritual health as well.

Several of the men laid hands on me. I felt an incredible energy sitting around the fire that night—not necessarily electric, but you could feel the intense amount of energy coming from within them. It felt like they were connecting with something very powerful inside you. And they would lay hands on you for anywhere from thirty seconds to a minute and a half, sing over you, then hug you and move on to the next person. They’d focus on four or five people, then move on to twenty minutes of dancing, chanting, spasming, eating coals, and diving into the sand. At times, they were so exhausted that they collapsed for as long as a half hour, almost passing out. The women attended to them, cradling the men’s heads in their laps and holding their hands until they were able to stand again, still in trance, and continue to walk around the fire.

This trance work was incredibly intense to experience as a spectator—and I can’t even imagine what actually entering the meditative state would be like. For the Bushmen, this ritual is necessary. The men are said to remember everything that happens during their trance experience. If they have an out-of-body experience, they can document it. If they discover someone is sick, they will relay the message, ensuring proper care is taken.

Toward what I believed to be the end of the evening, Xaxe, a great hunter, healer, and shaman, laid hands on me. Things got very different very quickly. By that point, I’d had hands laid on me two or three times by each of five men. Each time, I tried to quiet my head, breathe, and shut my eyes so that any access they wanted to have would be as unfettered as possible. However, the last time Xaxe laid his hands on me, it felt as if a defibrillator got strapped on my chest and back. They grip you sideways, one hand palm inward
on your chest, fingers spread, and one on your back. I felt the energy, his energy, surge through my body. He had his hands on me for about twenty-five or thirty seconds, but it felt like he had only touched me for a split second. Time stood still. I literally had a short out-of-body experience. I could see him touching me from just above my body, almost like I was floating six feet off the ground, watching myself. All of a sudden, I was back in my body observing an image of him thumbing through the book that contained all the pictures and moments in my life. I saw images of my childhood I hadn’t remembered in years, pictures of my mother and me walking on a beach and shelling, very strong images. At the time, both during his touch and immediately afterward, I described it as him flipping through the pages of my life. I felt he was curious and wanted to see what I was all about. In true Bushmen form, the only way to achieve that was to plumb my mind for images and stories, because our ability to communicate with each other was limited. (We did have translators with us, so holding conversation was possible but remained fairly simple.)

Later the next morning, I spoke with Xaxe about the trance dance. He told me he wanted access to me in a way that was not possible through a translator. The other men attempted to do the same thing, but it took hours until I achieved a meditative state myself that allowed me to feel them rummaging around in my head. Apparently, they had been going into my head and my body the entire night, but I just hadn’t been able to feel it.

Xaxe’s curiosity was such a caring, loving gesture. It didn’t feel intrusive or strange at all. He wasn’t treating me like a museum piece; he really wanted to understand me better. When he detached from me, I felt like someone was unplugging a lamp from a wall socket. As he let go of me and continued to dance around the fire, I spontaneously burst into uncontrollable tears. Not because of the beauty or his curiosity—simply put, I had been stripped to my emotional core, completely stunned by what I had just witnessed so up close and personal.

At that point, it was about midnight and I’d been at the fire for more than four hours. Exhausted, I headed back to my tent and collapsed into bed. The sounds of them singing and dancing in the desert lulled me to sleep. They have rattles on their feet that make this incredibly rhythmic noise, and the clapping, the singing, the rattling, the stomping combine to make a perfect sound to sleep to. When I woke at six in the morning, as the sun started to break the dawn, they were still at it. Still dancing, still singing, still clapping, one or two of them still in trance. Eventually, the ceremony ended, and nearly everyone slept through most of the day and evening.

The next afternoon, I sat down with Xaxe, Bom, and Xao and some of the other shamans to get their take on the Trance Dance. At the end of our conversation, Xaxe took my hand in his and, through our translator, told me to always respect people as I went out into the world. He explained that the most important thing a man can do is respect all people and love all people. He said it simply and very matter-of-factly. These are words that I’ve heard my whole life, but sitting there in the desert around the fire, they touched me in a unique way. I realized that I have a very unique set of circumstances working in my life, one that allows me to tell stories in written form and on television, and when I’m interviewed on radio or in a blog. I have an audience to which I can communicate the stories that make up the fabric of our global life. I have the power to bring down boundaries that separate people so we can legitimately spend more time talking and celebrating the things we have in common, rather than arguing about our differences. Xaxe saw that and wanted me to be sure to focus on the right message.

I changed in many ways on that trip, and I saw many things that illustrate our overdeveloped disposable cultural zeitgeist. The Juntwazee make sizable ropes out of a small plant that looks like an aloe plant. First, they squeeze all the water out of it, which is used for ear medicine. Then they scrape away the pulp and extract
the fibers out of the plant. Men and women alike work on creating this rope; they grease their hands, wet them with saliva, then braid the fibers by rolling them in the palms of their hands and knitting them together. They make both short and long ropes; three or four two-foot-long sections were rolled one day, and we were able to make little nooses out of them and affix them to the end of trip snares, which they set up using small sticks that we found on site in an area where large birds would come to feed on little nuts and berries in the ground. The bird takes the berry, trips the snare, the noose comes up, and the bird is caught.

As we returned from a hunt one day, we discovered a hawk bill dead in one of the snares, its neck snapped. We weren’t allowed to eat it that night, because if you eat the bird at night, the bird’s spirit will go out into the rest of the world and tell the other birds to avoid the snares. The Juntwazee have lots of myths about this kind of thing. But when we found the bird in the snare, I immediately took out my bush knife and unfolded it. I was trying to be helpful and offered to cut the rope. The Juntwazee looked at me as though I were crazy, asking the translator why I would cut the rope. They need the rope. They made that rope. No need to cut it—just loosen the rope and remove it from the bird and reuse it.

I realized at that point, like a sledgehammer being taken to my head, how wastefully and thoughtlessly I proceed through my life as a Westerner. I don’t live a life based on necessity and need. When it comes to taking twine out of the kitchen drawer to perform a task, I don’t think twice about tossing the used twine into the garbage. Unknot and fold the string away—that’s what crazy old people do, right? Don’t save little balls of string. You need new string. I’m the product of the modern American consumer culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We’re the most wasteful society on earth, but we have the ability and curiosity to see things in the world and learn from them. That’s what is special about these types of experiences: taking away the moments that touch and change you forever. I am no longer a rope-tossing fool.

It took a visit to a place 7,000 miles away from my home to be reminded—by somebody else’s grandfather—that life is meant to be based on love and respect for other people, not love and respect for self. Love and respect for self will come only by loving and respecting other people in the world around you, which makes the Juntwazee the most highly developed people on the planet. Love and respect is in all their hearts. There’s not a selfish bone in them. They have no personal possessions. The extended family, group, or tribe owns everything. These people are some of the last truly pure sprits on earth. Meeting and spending time with them is more important than spending time in the back of a safari vehicle in some national park, looking at elephants.

A Santero drips the blood from a freshly
slaughtered rooster over Andrew’s head during
a traditional Santerian initiation ritual in Cuba
.

he recent thaw in Cuban-American relations coincided with my recent trip there last spring. Travel can be transformative. One person, from one country, representing their own blend of culture and experience, meets another citizen of the world on their home turf. This is what makes what I do for a living such a powerful force for growth and change in the world. People often see me as the bug-eating guy, but I have only eaten bugs a handful of times in a few memorable minutes in hundreds of hours sprinkled across my television career. I see myself as creating a powerful voice for globalism and international understanding, for the idea that by sharing food we experience another culture in unique, personal ways, by breaking bread with real people, in truly local haunts, eating honest and authentic cuisine. You’ll never get the full picture clinging close to a hotel lobby. By focusing on our commonalities like our mutual love of food, we can really share life with people we just met in lands far away. We forget our differences, and the matters of our daily life that can only lead to conflict and misunderstanding. Cross the first barrier, share a meal, and the next conversation can safely be had. Trust me on this. I spent a week in Chile last year. It wasn’t until I shared a meal in a Chilean home that I finally got the real story about the struggles of dissidents, changes in national identity, and personal experience with both. Try learning that by shoving a microphone in someone’s face. It has happened for me in China, Vietnam, France, and Italy, even Tennessee. It was here
that a young woman confided her personal story in me. We sat quietly in a corner and I listened, eating possum neck and dunking my corn bread in pot liquor from the greens. Just a Jew from New York and a mountain girl from rural Appalachia trusting each other because we were sharing a meal.