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The healers weren't interested in convincing anyone of their effectiveness. They charged nothing. They didn't have to. People gave to them generously. Each day, multitudes of people came to the healers, and seemed to get better, or at least feel better, no matter what I or any other skeptic might have thought. |
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After I had learned where the healers worked in Manila, I tried to figure out how to watch them do whatever it was that they did. I contemplated the problem, as I wandered around the crowded second floor of the Manila Hotel, where several Americans had come to be healed. Before I had time to meet anyone, a bright-eyed, salt and pepper-haired man came right up to me and introduced himself. With a sense of urgency, he explained that he was next in line to see the healer Thelma Zuniga. Then he anxiously asked if I would be willing to video his hemorrhoid operation. |
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I was taken off guard, and before I had time to answer, he handed me his camera, and showed me where to look and what to push. "Now, don't be bashful!" he urged. "Get right up close to her hands, and get it all on film! This is amazing stuff! I brought my seventy-two-year-old mother here last year, and they took out her tumors and healed her cancer. So this year, I came to have my hemorrhoids out, and I want to show my friends and family what they did when I go home!" So I said, "Okay." I had only the vaguest notion of what a hemorrhoid was, but the situation provided me with a perfect vantage point from which to carry out my mission. |
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I got right up close and filmed the healer, Thelma, pressing on his bare buttocks with her fingers. Watery, bloodlike fluid oozed down his thighs, and in a minute or so some purplish tissue appeared in Thelma's fingers. It looked like clusters of tiny grapes. She wiped his bottom with a wad of cotton and said, "Okay. Finished." As he pulled up his boxers, I looked askance and mumbled something, handed him his camera, and made a hasty getaway. |
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The next morning when I returned to the second-floor lobby of the hotel, I reluctantly encountered the man again. I asked him, sheepishly, "So, how are your hemorrhoids today?" and he said, "Honey, they're gone! It's great!" I questioned him skeptically, "Are you sure?" He exclaimed, "You bet |
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