Far below the cloud forests of the Peruvian Andes, downriver from the place where the Ucayali and Marañón converge to form the headwaters of the Amazon, Orlando Chujandama Huazanga is calling the spirits to The New Rising Sun, a humble compound in a small village called Llucayanacu on banks of the Huallaga River where he was born.
Orlando left home in the high Peruvian Amazon to peruse a formal education in Terapoto after the death of his grandfather and teacher, Don Aquilino Chujandama, one of the most respected masters in the field of Vegetalismo of this region.
A curandero, or traditional indigenous healer, Orlando cures physical and spiritual illnesses by means of Vegetalismo; the Amazonian tradition of spiritual herbalism practiced in South America. Vegetalismo is the elegant and refined sacred science that uses master plants with sentient spirits. He carries the knowledge of a powerful family linage using the flora and fauna from the jungle; his practice includes psychoactive Ayahuasca and Tobacco.
As part of his training in Vegetalismo, he has engaged in long periods of isolation in the jungle under the guidance of master plant spirits and his grandfather. Though no longer in the flesh, the tutelage of his grandfather continues in dreamtime.
I sat down with Orlando in the jungle outside his maloka (ceremony space) to ask him some questions. This interview was translated in real time from Spanish by Vegetalista, Metsa Niwue.
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SS: What’s your name? What do you do?
OC: My name is Orlando Chujandama and I work with Amazonic plants. What I do actually is I use medicinal plants to heal people. I have patients that come and see me and I take care of them. I do this job because it comes from my grandfather. It’s a linage that comes from my people.
SS: What is that linage?
OC: I am an indigenous person coming from the Quechua people. The knowledge I have came from my grandfather. I use leaves and roots and barks and different types of medicine that grow in the jungle and apply them for the pathology of the patients.
SS: What is this place?
OC: This place is called Llucayanacu, that’s the name of a small river that comes on the mountain and goes around the little town. This particular place is my own land and it’s called the New Rising Sun and it’s where people come to get healing.
SS: How do you do what you do?
OC: What I do is to extract the plant. I go in the jungle. I do a small ceremony. I blow Tobacco on the plant and ask permission to extract what I need to take from nature, and then I apply their medicinal properties, or spiritual properties for the patient and I put them in a dieta mode.
SS: What is a dieta?
OC: The dieta is a time of isolation where people go into a small hut and they stay there for weeks to take their medicine and have the full benefit of the medicinal properties and the spiritual properties of the vegetals. They are under certain food restrictions and being isolated helps them to connect with nature and the spirits of the jungle. So they have to deal with the whole environment of mosquitoes and ants and all what comes with it.
SS: What are you doing when you sing icaros (medicine songs) to your patients? How does that work?
OC: Through the songs that we call the icaros, it helps us to connect with nature. So we call the spirit of the plant, the spirit of Earth, of Mother Nature…of all the elements of what need to be called for the patient. And if they come, they help the person with the medicine and to receive the energy of it.
SS: One of the plants you work with is Ayahuasca. How do you use it?
OC: People talk a lot about Ayahuasca, one of the master plants. One of the guides. It has been used as a lot to get information. To connect and to have knowledge from other plants that can be used and applied for different purposes.
SS: So it’s diagnostic?
OC: Yeah. It’s diagnostic. It’s also used for treatment. But the problem is that in the modern western world people consider Ayahuasca as a drug. They consider it substance abuse and it’s not. For us, Amazonian man, Ayahuasca is a sacred medicine, a spiritual medicine.
SS: What is your highest aspiration?
OC: My intention is to help people. To help them in their medicinal problems and what they’re looking for and to reach a level of knowledge where I can be on the highest connection with the spirit world. And this is what I’m reaching through my hope.
SS: What is your biggest challenge?
OC: Is this moment, the most difficult for me is to organize the project that I’m taking on with my own resources: Legalize the farm, promote it; build everything.
SS: What’s your saving grace?
OC: My knowledge of plants. My knowledge of the forest and my previous preparation as a healer. All the work that I’ve been doing all these years with plant medicine. The first one started when I was eleven years old with a great teacher that I had that was my grandfather, Don Aquilino Chujandama.
SS: What do you want people to know about what you’re doing?
OC: I want people to know about the work with plants that we have in the Amazon. It’s an alternative medicine that can help many different kinds of diseases. I would like this knowledge to be known and diffused.
Orlando’s New Rising Sun is the preservation of a lineage through perseverance. He is a highly skilled and accomplished practitioner invested with a powerful familial inheritance from his grandfather. It’s a powerful legacy to bear on the banks of the Huallaga River. If you feel the call of the jungle, he and the plants will be waiting for you. Send him an email (in Spanish) to let him know you’re coming: yacu80@hotmail.com. Website: thenewrisingsun.wordpress.com.
Sam Slovick is writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. He is a regular contributor to LA Yoga Ayurveda and Health magazine and the LA Weekly. samslovick.com
New Rising Son was shot in Peru by Sam Slovick on Flip Cam in March, 2010 for The Cure Stream; a viral docu-series in conjunction with LA Yoga Magazine and The Cure List.
“Other Worlds” footage used by permission of Jan Kounen: otherworlds.jankounen.com
Additional ceremony footage by Ryan Wylie: www.innermissionproductions.com
By Sam Slovick
Award-winning journalist, documentary director and long-term LA Yoga contributor Sam Slovick is the director, writer and producer of the Radicalized documentary, currently working on the Kirtan Road Dogs documentary.