UNITED STATES
New York Magazine
By RACHEL MONROE
PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEXANDRA PAVLOVA
January 18, 2017
Ainlay Dixon, her husband, and three of their four children were in a town in central Ecuador, midway through a South American tour, when a guide approached and offered to take them on a four-day jungle excursion to see the “authentic” Amazon: an indigenous village led by a real shaman. To get there, the family took a 4×4 as far as they could down a rutted road, which soon dwindled to a trail; they made the rest of the way on foot. Eventually, they arrived at a small village where they were introduced to the village chief, a well-known shaman who’d had tourists flocking to his remote village ever since he’d been featured on a news show in Ecuador. That night, the shaman held a welcome ceremony for the new guests. They sat in a thatched roof hut while he blew pungent tobacco smoke on them, invoking a charm of protection. The novelty of the experience was tempered by the presence of another American — a strawberry-blonde Harvard Divinity School student named Lily Ross, who had been living in the village for the past few weeks, working for a grassroots nonprofit and researching shamanic practices.
Over the next few days, the Dixons’ children played soccer with the village kids. The family went on walks in the jungle with the shaman’s son, who rattled off the names and medicinal uses of the plants they came across. The day before the Dixons were set to depart, Ross asked Ainlay if they could speak privately. The two women found a space to sit in a guest hut, and Ross said that she and the shaman were in love. Something immediately struck Ainlay as off. “She would say that it was meant to be, and she would say that it was forever — but she was in a daze, talking almost in a monotone,” Ainlay said. Her concern piqued, Ainlay gently suggested that Ross was so isolated in this village, and so immersed in a culture that wasn’t her own, that perhaps she had lost her bearings a little bit. “That’s when she told me that they were bonded through this — I forget the name of the drink that they do. You know, the medicine. Through the medicine, they were bonded. And that he was really powerful.”
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