Healing journey to Amazon bears fruit

Ten years ago, when Moshe Reuven Schneider was diagnosed with depression and began taking a prescribed mood stabiliser, he felt like a zombie and decided he didn’t want to live like that for the rest of his life.

So, he sought an alternative, plant-based form of healing that led him to spend a month in the Amazon rainforest with the indigenous Huni Kuin tribe.

Schneider, who is a King David Linksfield alumnus, said that the medication was the impetus that led him to this journey to discover “what tribal people have been doing for thousands of years to heal flu or eczema and other ailments”.

Four years ago, he met a pajé (spiritual healer) from the Huni Kuin tribe at a traditional healing conference in Cape Town. Since then, the healer and Schneider developed a relationship that culminated in the latter being invited to spend time learning the ways of the tribe in the Amazon.

On 2 February, Schneider set off for the Amazon. To get there, he took three flights – one to Brazil, and then two domestic flights within Brazil to get where he needed to go so that he could get aboard a nine-hour car ride to a port city. From there, he had an 18-hour-long canoe journey on the upper Jordão River to get to the village. He then spent more than a month learning in the village, and returned to Johannesburg on 9 March.

The Huni Kuin tribe live in different clusters of villages, each containing 120 to 140 people. Each family unit has its own house made from wood built on stilts to prevent flooding from the Amazon River or to prevent snakes and other creatures from getting into the house.

“They have their homes, but they are completely a village. Someone can just randomly walk into somebody’s house, and they’ll feed him or take care of him, or you could just sleep in someone else’s hammock. It’s like they really care about each other,” he said, “They hunt with spears that they make, and with bows and arrows. They also fish with spears, and they eat meat, fish, and chicken and all types of different fruits and vegetables.

“They live a healthy, active life. If they’re not finding or making medicine or hunting or fishing, they’re making beads and different types of natural jewellery, scarves, or headgear. And then they’re also cutting grass on the land so that they avoid snakes,” he said.

Schneider said that he was introduced to several different plants, each with healing properties for different ailments, through natural and spiritual healers in the village. One of those which had the biggest impact was the Sananga, the bark of a shrub, which the tribe uses as an eyedrop.

“They take the bark off this shrub. They completely clean it from the roots, and cook it in water in a pot on a fire until it gets to a certain concentration, then they drain out the plant material and keep the water. Inside that water is the medicine,” he said. “It’s an eye drop that goes into the eye while the person is lying down. When the person opens their eyes, the medicine of the Sananga goes into their eyes, and it burns, and that burning helps with ocular diseases like cataracts, styes, or glaucoma.”

Not only did it clean the eye, it also cleaned the mind and flushed the body of all its negativity, Schneider said. “During the Sananga, because the eye drop burns the eye, they guide a person to breathe through the process, and the breathing takes them away from the pain,” he said.

Schneider was also introduced to the healing properties of a frog called Kambo, or the Phyllomedusa bicolor. The secretion is poisonous to protect the frog from predators, but the Huni Kuin discovered that it could be medicinal through bioactive peptides.

“They take the secretion of the frog, and they put it onto little gateways which they make on the skin. The medicine starts going into the body, and the different peptides work to reawaken all the different cells of the body. It removes any toxins inside the body – the kidneys, gallbladder, or any part of the gut. It just completely pulls it out. It’s quite an intense process,” he said.

Schneider said it wasn’t just his status as the only foreigner among 120 people that made him an outsider in the village, but the fact that he was the first Orthodox Jewish person they had ever met. “They understood that I was different to anyone who had ever been to their village before,” he said.

“They were gobsmacked when they saw me putting on tefillin and praying in the morning. They had never seen anything like this. Afterwards, the chief came up to me and said that he could see that the Jewish people were holy.”

On his first Shabbat there, the tribe connected the one generator it had to one of the houses so that the whole village could watch a documentary on the Jewish people in Portuguese so that they could understand who he was.

Schneider said that after his first week in the village, people started calling him “Shalom”, then after his second week, they started calling him “Shabbat”.

“The chief’s son saw that when I would eat a new fruit, I would hold it and make a blessing,” he said, “Because of this, he took me on about a 34km walk through the jungle. We probably ate about eight different fruits that I’ve never eaten before in my life, just so that I could say shehecheyanu bracha for all these different fruits.”

“Western medicine has a massive role in the world,” he said, “but it’s also abused and people get stuck on these medications for the rest of their lives and there’s nothing they can do about it. It’s in such instances that the natural path is so intriguing.”