Nicaragua’s Crazy Sickness

It took us the better part of a day to reach Krin Krin, a village of some 400 inhabitants, all of them Miskitu, where grisi siknis outbreaks were legendary. In 2000, almost a quarter of the townspeople had come down with the illness, and in 2003, Krin Krin was part of the epidemic that spread through eight communities along the river. Sensational accounts appeared in Managua’s newspapers describing the crazed antics of those afflicted and referring to the ailment as both grisi siknis and histeria colectiva. The stories quoted doctors whose efforts to treat the symptoms failed. And though some suspected grisi siknis might be related to mercury or other poisons, the consensus was that treatment was best left up to traditional healers such as Porcela, who were in tune with the Miskitus’ rich spirit world. Dr. Florence Levy, who studied medicine in Managua and at the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told me, “No, I don’t think I’m the one to treat it.” Levy was convinced that Porcela had done the job.

After stopping in a small community called Wiwinak—where we arranged to interview Wilton Muller, a doctor with Christian Medical Action, on the return journey—we climbed back aboard our bató and headed off to Krin Krin. Twenty-five minutes into the trip, as we swept around a long curve in the Río Coco, the bright blue sky gave way to an eerie muted light. I shivered. Movement high to my right caught my attention and I looked up to see a pair of huge black vultures hovering above our small craft. With the ragged edges of their outstretched wings fully extended, these harbingers of evil soared across the darkening sky in a broad circle. The buzzards seemed to draw us toward Krin Krin as we glided over the Río Coco’s smooth surface. Large fragments of charred ash floated down from the sky. Like huge black snowflakes, they landed on our faces and clothing. A handful of old wooden buildings appeared beneath a few anemic trees above us on the river’s badly eroded southern bank. Lines of laundry hung limply in the subdued air. As we pulled up to shore, several children, their bellies distended by parasite infestations, scampered down the riverbank to meet us. Following Ana Rosa’s and Dud’s lead, I climbed ashore, only to be greeted by a small growling dog who snapped at my ankles. The ash, we soon learned, came from fires burning agricultural debris.

Our arrival, though unanticipated, was soon conveyed to the town’s elders, and a crowd assembled to meet us. In Miskitu, Ana Rosa explained that we’d come to Krin Krin to learn more about grisi siknis. She asked the townspeople if anyone would tell us their story. Seemingly unperturbed by our request, they summoned Aida Gomez, a woman who had been afflicted a year earlier and claimed she wasn’t completely cured yet. As the people set out old primary school desks at one end of a huge covered hall, we observed the town.

Krin Krin had no defined village centre. Instead, small unpainted wooden homes were scattered across the choppy terrain. The houses sat on stilts in anticipation of the rainy season’s flash floods, and had screenless windows and wooden shutters. Barbed-wire fencing separated many of these simple structures. Most had a small tree or two in the backyard, but the land had otherwise been stripped bare by cows, pigs, and goats that roamed freely. The corners of some yards contained the whitewashed above-ground tombs of relatives. Krin Krin had a cement well, but apparently it didn’t provide water.

When the moment arrived, we crammed into our desks. Ana Rosa sat to my right, Dud on my left. Teobaldo, Raili, Jesús, Patricio, Eduardo, Niéves, and Aida formed a loose semicircle before us, waiting expectantly for our questions. The light was dim in the fading evening, and a growing number of villagers looked in through open windows. Several came inside and leaned against the wall to better hear what was going on. Our appearance, I realized, was high entertainment.

Sporting a Fu Manchu moustache and long sideburns, Patricio wore a blue baseball cap and black trousers. His sinewy body and deeply etched face told a story of hard work and inadequate food. He allowed a young child to sit on his lap during the proceedings. The youngster, clothed only in a black net shirt, seemed comfortable not wearing any pants. When he squirmed his way to the floor, it exposed the sinister image of Dracula adorning Patricio’s black T-shirt. It was painted in white, yellow, and bloody red. I shivered again as the gloom enveloped us and evening caught hold.

” The outbreak,” Jesús said, “began in my house.” His daughter Licha, who was only eight years old at the time, was the first to be infected. Initially she simply had a headache and felt dizzy, a condition referred to as bla in Miskitu, but as the young girl fell into a trance, her mouth began to move uncontrollably. As is characteristic of the condition, her eyes turned red and it was necessary to tie her up or risk having her flee. Licha also suffered from another symptom typical of grisi siknis. It began with a bulging, churning movement in her abdomen and ended, according to several eye witnesses, when the young girl vomited a live spider. This would not be the last I heard of victims regurgitating strange objects. Though no one outside these communities ever corroborated such stories, many Miskitus spoke about vomiting pieces of glass, hair, nails, and coins, in addition to live spiders, cockroaches, and, in one case, a grasshopper. I recalled the odd list of ingredients used by curandero Carlos Salomon Taylor.

Licha, now thirteen years old, took a seat at one of the desks. The sun had dropped well below the horizon, and I couldn’t make out her face. But eerie as it was for me to be interviewing these Miskitus in the soupy darkness, I can only imagine how it felt to this young woman. She’d likely seen Dud, Ana Rosa, and me arrive. Dud, tall and lumbering, huge by Nicaraguan standards; me, with my blond hair and white skin, also an aberration. We snapped photos, flashes blazing. We carried notebooks and I used a penlight to illuminate its pages. Asking questions from behind my glowing torch, I hoped I didn’t sound like an interrogator.

Licha’s most vivid memory was of the visions that accompanied her illness. She described small, black men riding red horses. They came down from the mountains to lure her away from the village. They offered her a cup filled with blood. She was afraid of the duende, as the Miskitu refer to the spirits from the forest, but felt compelled to follow these powerful strangers anyway. Licha was also disturbed by her ability to predict who the next grisi siknis victim would be and was at a loss to explain how this knowledge came to her.

Licha’s description of men on horses was often repeated, both by those who’d been affected by grisi siknis and by researchers I met who’d studied the disease. Sandra Davis, an instructor in the humanities department at uraccan, a small Miskitu university with a campus in Puerto Cabezas, is skeptical about supernatural explanations and is convinced that sexual abuse has a lot to do with it. She explained that grisi siknis is a way for young women to escape, if only for a time, from a hard life that offers few prospects. “Many Miskitu men at the end of the war knew nothing but how to point a gun, drink beer, and take drugs. That’s another form of grisi siknis,” she told me, suggesting that the disease is indeed rooted in conflict and poverty.