OSEA Maya Health and Healing Program

Ideal for Pre-Med students and Medical Anthropology students and other persons from any variety of research and applied fields who are interested in cross-cultural health and healing.

Program Structure
Students live in Piste and take seminar coursework at OSEA. During the four weeks of the program students do shadow work with different types of healers. OSEA sets up ethnographic shadowing and direct learning with healers of different types and in different communities.

Two weeks of the program the students will shadow local Piste healers. Options include traditional herbalists, midwifes, private allopathic doctors, and doctors in private clinics or in the government social security clinic. During the other two weeks of the program, students have the opportunity to do ethnographic shadowing with healers in other communities located between 20 and 60 minutes away from Pisté. Opportunities include working with spiritual healers, herbalists, midwifes, traditional Maya massagers and bone-setters, Hméen, and traditional divinors. The majority of program fees supports this long distance travel away from home-site of Piste. Specific monolingual Maya healers may require interpreter, which would included in the program fee.

Participants normally conduct 3 to 4 hours a day of shadow work for twenty days during the four week period. This totals 60-80 hours total of shadow work with the variety of traditional Maya and allopathic healers. The program also includes 25 hours of seminar coursework.

Coursework
Participants in the OSEA Maya Health and Healing Program do seminar work in two areas. Students are provided an introduction to Medical Anthropology and read extensively on Maya culture specifically focused on health, healing, spiritualism, religion, and identity. Students are not expected to have any background in anthropology. However, because the program is restricted in size, OSEA can tailor fit coursework and readings to the appropriate level of the participants. Participants who have an advanced knowledge and coursework experience in Medical Anthropology are provided individually designed coursework to match their career objectives and professional research goals.