Question From a reader:

DID YOU EVER FIND OUT WHO PUT THE ‘BAD MEDICINE’ IN YOUR YARD?
No.
As the story ‘Bad Medicine’ suggests, thinking that someone might be trying to put a spell on you is very destabilizing to your relationships. It elicits questions from ‘who did I offend?’ to ‘who, really, is the target of this magic?’ Is someone trying to harm me? Or is the person who ‘found it’ trying to make me suspicious of someone that he has a grudge with? Witchcraft is all about relationships. We purposely decided NOT to try to figure out who did it, because that kind of thinking would rob us from a certain kind of innocence in our relationships.

The fact that witchcraft is all about relationships does not make it less real.

Twenty years earlier, Dr. Andy C. invited me to go on rounds with him through the small remote hospital that he operated in Kolahun, Liberia. At the end of rounds we passed a teenaged girl lying alone in a room. Dr. Andy was trained in the USA, a pilot, and was doing epidemiological research on Lassa Fever. Yet, this highly educated and accomplished doctor told me: “She is dying because someone witched her.” He explained that, in spite of his psychiatric training, medication, and the availability of tranquilizers, the power of belief in witchcraft would eventually lead to her death. He concluded his explanation with: "I have seen this over and over again."
I was in my mid-twenties, that early morning, but this lesson about witchcraft has never left me.