Songs That Heal

Preserving A Thousand-Year-Old Tradition

Only six people in the world know how to do what Sergio Pacheco is about to do. Pacheco stands in the middle of a crowd on the National Mall, wearing a feathered headdress, beaded necklace and wrinkled dress that's been hand painted with a large, maroon bird on the front.
Pacheco is a traditional doctor among the Wachiperi (or Huachipaire), a thousand-year-old ethnic group living in the Madre de Dios Region near the Brazilian border in the Peruvian Amazon