@agingexplorer
The women arrive with the dawn, many on overnight buses from the mountains. Their traditional layered petticoats and bowler hats identify them as curanderos (healers) and they gather each week at the witches’ market in Lima, where the faithful wait to be cured.
They are from the mountains, living a life unchanged in centuries: a merging of Catholicism, the Afro-Caribbean religion of Santería and folk superstition, and also the modern world. The healers gather in a huge tent under banners that list their websites and mobile phone numbers, and photos that depict their medical specialities. Business cards detail their healing tools of eggs, coca leaves and even live guinea pigs, all of which they claim can cure anything from broken bones to cancer. Each stall offers displays of fetishes and totems that will cast spells or repel the evil eye, a belief taken seriously here.