There are many names for it: catching
jumbie, antebanta, catching spirit...or, for the pseudo-intellectual
who doesn't want to sound backwards, there are euphemisms like
“sickness” or “the problem.” In American terms, teenagers at
the high school in my village are believed to be possessed.
One girl jumped off a second-story
balcony. (She was uninjured.) Others have tried to rip their clothes
off, have said strange things, wriggled around on the floor like a snake, claimed to see or feel things
that aren't there, or have become physically violent. Most withdraw,
some into a completely nonresponsive state. Some cry or feel
physically sick.
Bullshit, right? A Westerner might say that these students are simply faking it for attention. One case and it could be epilepsy, but with
dozens of students affected, it must just be a ploy to get out of
class.
Honestly, I don't know what to believe.
The first girl to be affected, months ago, was a student I knew
well, and I assumed that it was a psychological issue, perhaps the
result of some trauma that no one knows about. When so many students
were affected, part of me scoffed at the idea of a spirit controlling
what a child does. I didn't take it very seriously. But then I was
at the school when a student “got sick,” and I watched him as he
laid down and gradually stopped responding to anything, finally
arriving at a state where not even his eyes were moving. If he was
acting, he needs to be nominated for an Academy Award, because it
sure looked real to me.
I encountered it firsthand again today.
The new thing now is “little people”...several children have
claimed to see people a foot or two tall around the village. THAT I
couldn't help but laugh at. Then today, two boys “saw a little man
come out of the blackboard” (mind you, another teacher interrupted
my class to bring this to my attention, because she didn't know what
to do). Subsequently, the boys started acting strangely. They were
sent home but came back after lunch, and one boy, about 11 years old,
“relapsed.” The teacher came to me, exasperated and probably a
little scared. She was supervising two classrooms, the boys' class
teacher was absent, and she just didn't know what to do about it. I
figured I couldn't just leave the kid freaking out, so I left my
class and walked over to find him standing in the sand with tears
running down his face while the rest of the class watched on. Uhhh.
Peace Corps training didn't cover this.
So I shooed his classmates away, and,
agnostic that I am, instructed the kid to bless himself and say the
Our Father. I didn't really know what else to do. That's how the
Ministry of Education handles it—they send in people to pray for
the kids. (One woman suggested wiping the whole school down with
garlic water. I'm not sure if that plan was actually executed.)
My proximity to this situation isn't
making me believe in the supernatural. I wouldn't bet my life on the
non-existence of spirits, but I think it's about a million times more
likely that there's a scientific explanation for this phenomenon that
we just don't understand. There's apparently something known as
“teenage hysteria” that this completely fits
into...unfortunately, psychologists aren't too sure about what
exactly causes it. (Google for more information. It's pretty
weird.)
Anyway, the one thing I am fairly
certain about when it comes to kids catching jumbie is that it's all
in their heads. So, to fix it, you need to work within their
patterns of thought. If the kid believes he's possessed by a demon,
make him pray. It worked, sort of—I couldn't get him to walk or
talk before we prayed, but he whispered the prayer along with me and
afterward I was able to walk him over to the side to sit down.
Fifteen minutes later he was playing with his friends again. Kelly
Cahill, Peace Corps Volunteer and Exorcist? I need to start carrying
around a Bible and a vial of holy water.
It takes a lot of mental effort to not
scream “I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON AND IT'S WEIRD BUT IT'S NOT
SPIRITS!” when people are talking about antebanta. I try my best
to be culturally sensitive and only when asked do I share my
opinion that it's baffling but, I'm certain, psychological. This
afternoon the side of science/reason/logic got some points when the
first set of boys who saw the little men (they weren't
psychologically affected) were interrogated and admitted that they
made the whole thing up. Almost makes me admire the 13-year-olds who
managed to freak out a whole village full of adults. Hey, there's
not much to do in the mission, they gotta get their laughs somehow...
