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Rituals
A "misfortune ritual" of a Kallawaya warmi yachaj, a woman diviner, illustrates how ailments of Chagas' disease can be seen to reflect the forces of nature.
A warmi yachaj was called to perform a sajjra mesa, a misfortune ritual. The first part of the ritual is performed in the cooking room of the house of the family member suffering from ailments to dispel the misfortune of the wind. The second part is performed near a river to wash the misfortune away. A woman performs sickness rituals to the wind and river because of the woman's structural position in a society in which she marries and moves away from her matrilineage but in which her daughters marry and return to their mother's land. She links the generations in marriage in a movement away and yet continues. According to age-old traditions, women are linked to misfortunes, causing them as well as removing them. Rivers also wash away misfortune as well as restore them.
Wayra, wind, has two aspects: it serves as a metaphorical vehicle for cursing people, and it also brings the rain clouds that washes away sickness - to remove the chijekuna (invisible troublesome substances) within the sufferer and to dispose of the chijenkuna within the river.  The wind's two climatic properties parallel the river's two relationships to the mountain as both erosive and cyclical. As Andean etiolgy parallels telluric forces of nature, so too Andean ethnomedicine symbolically serves these forces.
Participants of the ritual enter the river's water to cleanse their bodies and return home. The warmi yachaj can reveal that sickness is related to corporeal, social, and geographical entities and that the human body in its constitution and dissolution is related to similar factors within the environment. In a sense, every one of the ritual's symbols suggested retuning to its place in nature. In a symbolic way, this could be seen as the desired return of vinchucas and T. cruzi to their forest environment.
The sajjra mesa is far removed from the microscopic view of the disease of paleopathogists. The former finds wind, river, and earth; the latter finds nests of amastigotes within human tissue. Neither perspective presents an entirely complete picture of Chagas' disease. Andean ritual symbolically and spiritually adds to microbiology by metaphorically reversing the microscope and seeing the broader context.
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