At 12,000 feet in the Andes, I lived with descendants of the Incas, Indians who had never seen a white woman in their village, viewed me with suspicion and then overnight saw me as a magic healer. They lined up outside my door to be healed.

In 1974 I had never heard of the word “placebo” and didn’t even know about the concept behind the word. Below is an excerpt from my memoir, the story of how I came face to face with the placebo effect high in the Andes Mountains.

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The hacienda reeked of neglect, abandoned for nearly a century by the Spanish landowner whose descendants lived in Quito. The fair skinned great grandson, Marcel, invited me to tea to talk over my request to stay in his decrepit ancestral home, rent-free. He expressed amusement that an American woman would want to live in the rat-infested structure with parts of the roof caved in, isolated in the Andes at 12,000 ft. among destitute and illiterate Indians, all alone—without a husband.

Marcel assumed I was an anthropologist, even after I explained that I belonged to the Peace Corps and had chosen this remote Ecuadorian village to help bring literacy to the area. He eventually agreed to my odd request, laughing and shaking his head in bemusement. His parting words, “You’ll only last a few days up there. Call me when you come to your senses. We’ll have some fun together in the city.”

When I taught on the Navajo Reservation for two years in the early 1970s before joining the Peace Corps, I had been trained to teach bilingual education, Navajo and English. In Ecuador I intended to use those skills to help the Quechua-speaking Indians learn Spanish so their children could eventually find work and help support their families.

The Indians in this remote area had not seen a white person like me before, other than the Quechua-speaking priest from Spain who had lived among them for a few decades and converted most of them to Catholicism. In all those years, the priest never taught the Indians to read or speak Spanish with any proficiency. The custom was to keep them illiterate so they wouldn’t have access to the Bible where they could read what Jesus really had to say.

My arrival in the mountain hamlet coincided with the priest’s time of departure back to Spain. I got to spend a few days with him in his little house adjacent to the run-down chapel, before his last hike down the mountain. Although he had never heard of the Peace Corps, he expressed suspicion that the organization intended to instigate dissent among poor people and start a revolution. His parting words to me, spoken with gravitas, were, “Don’t talk to the Indians about politics. They are simple. They don’t understand these things. Don’t pollute their minds.”

Rumor had it that an anthropologist had come to study the Indians a couple decades earlier. He was killed by the people because they were afraid of him. But, now they were good Catholics and weren’t supposed to kill people. At least, that’s what I was counting on.

The first time I hiked up the mountain to the remote village of La Compañia de Jesus Cristo, the people fled at the sight of me. I had on jeans, a bulky sweater to protect against the cold mountain air, stiff mountain boots, and lugged a large backpack more than half my height, containing most of what I would need to spend the next two years up there in the mountains.

For the first few days I felt very alone. No one would come near me. When I approached the people working in the fields, they dropped their hoes and fled to their thatch-roofed homes made of mud bricks. Even the dogs were afraid of me and bolted with their tails between their legs.

In my solitude, I took long walks. I noted the surrounding fields produced barley, quinoa, cabbage, and potatoes. That’s what their diet consisted of almost exclusively. The well off families had a few pigs and sheep. For festive occasions, like a wedding or a saint’s day, they killed and ate the guinea pigs they kept on the dirt floor of their homes. They made a strong alcoholic drink, called chicha, out of a yucca plants that grew along the dirt paths. I wondered if they had ever tasted fresh fruit.

The next day I hiked down the mountain with my empty backpack. Once I made it to the paved road below, I hitched a ride to the nearest food market. I filled my pack with oranges, along with staples so I could cook meals in the makeshift kitchen at the hacienda, one of the few rooms that had an intact roof overhead.

After five hours of lugging the painfully heavy pack up the mountain, I arrived back at the village. A few brave children looked at me with curiosity, a safe distance away. They followed me to the hacienda, trailing about 150 feet behind. When I got to the ramshackle building, I took out the oranges and held them up in the air for the children to see. They inched a little closer to get a better look.

I put an orange about 50 feet from the house and walked away. The children waited a few moments, then ran to the orange sitting on the ground and stared at it for a few moments. One of them grabbed the orange and ran away, the pack of kids trailing behind. Each day I placed an orange a little closer to me.

On the fourth day, I held an orange in my outstretched hand. The children cautiously approached. About a dozen boys and girls encircled me. They were barefoot, with ragged and torn clothes, bright faces full of curiosity, framed by thick, jet-black hair. The boys wore pants and ponchos; the girls wore dark skirts held up by woven waistbands, blouses and brightly colored shawls, all hand woven. They smelled of wood smoke. One of the girls walked boldly up to me, grabbed the orange and took off running.

Next day, the same girl approached. She looked at the orange, looked me fleetingly in the eye, then cautiously climbed into my lap. After nestling in, she took the orange from my hand, placed it between her teeth, and bit out a piece of the skin. She squeezed the orange; the juice ran down her delighted face. As she began peeling the rind, some of the other children, mostly girls, drew closer and started cautiously touching me, as though I were a strange insect or a snake.

Most of the boys hung back as the girls explored the surface of my body. One girl touched my light colored hair and ran a strand through her fingers while another parted my hair with her fingers and peered in toward my scalp, probably looking for lice I imagined. A third girl gently rubbed the skin on my arm, as though checking to see if the white would rub off. They ran their hands over much of my body, poking and pinching my skin. The girl in my lap began patting my body, including my chest. When her hands came to my breasts, she screeched, “Mama!” Her revelation was followed by a chorus of squeals echoing her discovery. They all stood in amazement. A couple other girls reached over to see if it was really true that I was indeed a woman. All the children had big smiles on their faces as they ran home to spread the news.

Only men wore pants in the Quechua culture. I had nothing but pants with me and, to make matters even more confusing for them, my bulky sweaters completely hid what was underneath. My shoulder-length hair offered no clue either. Both men and women wore long hair. And no Quechua woman would ever venture into unknown territory without a man to accompany her. But now the truth of my gender was revealed and the children were spreading the word.

From that moment on, I was accepted into the community. Every morning the children came to ask for fruit. One day I pulled out one of my cameras, a Polaroid, to take a picture of them. Before I could press the button, they had fled in terror. The camera looked all too similar to a gun. A few days later one of the braver boys agreed to hold the camera in his hand. I showed him how to take a picture of his friends. When the children saw the developed picture, they couldn’t understand what they were seeing. They turned the picture around in all directions, trying to make sense out of what they saw. Over time, they all wanted their picture taken. The adults, on the other hand, wouldn’t have anything to do with being photographed, convinced that the camera would capture their spirit, much like what the traditional Navajos believed would happen.

After a couple of weeks, I played a new game with the children. In order for them to get their piece of fruit, they each needed to tell me a little story that I would record with my portable tape recorder, a little black box that did not frighten them because it looked a lot like the little black instamatic camera they were used to by now. The stories were simple and mostly described their lives on the mountain. When I played back the recordings, the children were mesmerized. It was certainly some kind of magic from a land far away, which I told them was called America.

I had learned a little Quechua before taking on the remote mountain assignment, but not much—enough to make myself understood, supplemented with gestures and mime. An itinerant Spanish-speaking teacher, Pilar, who came occasionally to the village, helped me to transcribe and translate the stories into Spanish with the ultimate goal of making a bilingual primer to be used in the isolated Quechua-speaking schools, along with a bilingual dictionary. (*see endnote)

After a few weeks the adults wanted to get a closer look at this stranger from far away, from a place called America, where women look and act like men and don’t have husbands. Invitations were pouring in to eat meals with families. Invariably the meals consisted of a huge bowl of soup with variations of everything they grew—barley, quinoa, cabbage, and potatoes. To honor me, they sometimes killed one of their precious guinea pigs. I had been a vegetarian but I was advised during the Peace Corps orientation to eat everything I was offered to be polite and not offend the hosts. I gagged down the guinea pig meat, trying to appear like I was enjoying the taste. Actually, the taste wasn’t bad, a bit like tender chicken. It was the idea of eating rodents that made me queasy. After each meal, I sat around on the dirt floor for about an hour before returning home. During that time, girls came over and looked for lice in my head. After a while I learned to relax and enjoy the inspections.

Eventually the adults began lining up in front of the hacienda every morning, bringing me their problems. They insisted on calling me “Patrona” which means “Boss Lady.” Each time I said in my broken Quechua mixed with Spanish, “I’m not your boss. My name is Erica.” They answered, “Ok, Patrona.”

Early one morning as I lay in bed, I heard a woman’s voice yelling, “Patrona. Patrona. Ayudenos!!” I threw on my clothes and went to the entryway of the hacienda. I pushed aside the piece of cloth I used for a door and stepped outside. Three anxious mothers were holding sick, crying babies looking feverish and congested, bundled up in shawls. They asked me to “cure the babies.” I told them emphatically I was not a doctor and did not know what to do. “Ok, Patrona.” They just stood there, begging, pleading for me to do something. I repeated that I didn’t know what to do because I wasn’t a doctor. But I wanted with all my heart to help these mothers and their babies. I tried to hold back my tears. “Please God help me. What shall I do?”

After imploring help from the heavens, I went resolutely inside the hacienda, took out the first aid kit the Peace Corps office had given me, found the bottle of aspirin and took out one single tablet. I crushed the tablet with my fingers until there was just a little pile of white dust. I went outside and told the mothers I found some medicine. I went to each baby and put a grain of the dust on the baby’s tongue, made the sign of the cross on the baby’s forehead knowing that the Indians were Catholic and said a short prayer in Spanish. The mothers smiled and walked away.

They seemed pleased, but I felt guilty, like I had committed a mortal sin pretending I was Catholic. And what good would come from pretending a grain of aspirin would help them? I hoped God would forgive me for being a fraud.

The next morning I heard a woman’s voice outside calling “Patrona! Patrona!” I ran to the front entry. Two of the mothers had returned, each holding a roasted guinea pig impaled on a stick from the anus to the mouth.

Before I could think about how I was going to eat these gifts that looked a lot like skewered rats, my attention abruptly shifted back to the mothers. They told me in broken broken Spanish that all three babies were cured. I asked them to repeat what they said a second, then a third time to make sure I understood what they were saying. “Si, Patrona, toditos guaguas curados. Milagro grande. Que Dios le pague.”

Oh my God. How is that possible? How can all three of those sick babies be cured? It was only a speck of aspirin. That can’t cure any illness. And the Spanish prayer I recited was incomprehensible to those mothers. They don’t really speak much Spanish, other than a few words and expressions. What is going on?

Word spread around the region about the healing of the babies. People lined up to receive a “cure from the Patrona.” I indulged them, feeling that, at the very least, my care and concern couldn’t hurt. They didn’t regard me any less when my cures didn’t work—which more often than not, they didn’t, especially with the adults.

But just the fact that it ever worked at all was mind blowing to me. It wasn’t until a few years after leaving the Peace Corps that I learned exactly what the placebo effect is and how it works and the immense power of the mind. The pure faith in the minds of the mothers, relayed through some invisible connection with their babies, was able to change the condition of the sick babies overnight. I’ve often wondered if my heartfelt desire to relieve the suffering of the wailing babies might have played a role as well.

Whatever the case, I loved the taste I got of being able to help people relieve their suffering. The seeds for becoming a doctor had been well watered.

*Endnote: The day I left the Peace Corps, the little bi-lingual collection of stories was printed in Quito, called “Nucunchimunda”, which translates as “All About Us.” It was used for about ten years in the little classrooms in the mountain villages, according to the itinerant teacher who found me on Facebook four decades later.

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