A Day in the Life

A Day in the Life is more than just a great Beatles song, it's also a (hopefully) interesting look into the life of Mateo. So, with no further ado, come with me as I recap yesterday, Sunday, the 11th of Noviembre….

I wake up at 6:30am and eat oatmeal, which is lovely. It is a crisp morning.

From 7:30am to 8:00am I walk to the next community over, called “Guanacaste.” It is the day when all the moms with kids under 2 years old come to one house to have their babies weighed. As part of my research we a looking for changes in growth patterns secondary to decreased diarrheal disease burden, as a result of cleaner water provided by the filters. To figure this out, I’m teaching the community health volunteers to use an “infantometer” to measure the babies. This is a device in which you sandwich the little guys lengthwise, thereby getting a “height” (it is also a tool, incidentally, that I had quite a good time making from local materials). Anyway, I spent the morning teaching the health worker and weighing and measuring 27 little dudes and dudettes.

I would say the baby-weighing was fun, which it was in many ways, but that wouldn’t be truly fair, because it was also really, really sad. I actually found myself tearing up at one point (which I quickly repressed with my well-trained lacrimal-control abilities, because I am a manly man… and everyone would think I was crazy if they saw me crying). Why was I crying? Well, a kid would come over to the table to get measured, I would look at him and think, “that’s a cute 6 month old,” then we would get his name and birth date and the kid would be a year old. A YEAR old. Over half the kids we measured were more than three standard deviations below the mean for height and weight for their age. THREE standard deviations. That means they are so malnourished that they are growing more poorly than 95% of the kids in the world.. As if it isn’t bad enough this helpless little kid is so freaking malnourished that he’ll never grow to his full potential, physically or intellectually, I then lay him on the infantometer and see the distinctive lesions of scabies in the creases of his ankles. Great, so this kid it being screwed for life AND he itches all the time from an easily preventable and treatable infection? Yeah, that’s fair. It’s somewhat satisfying to know that I’m here doing what I can to give this kid a chance, but it still breaks my heart to see such needless suffering.

Anyway, I get back home at 12;30pm and there are three people waiting for me on my porch, each with a different project they want to discuss. I arrange a date for GPS-mapping a water project with an adorable, incredibly strong, 65 year old woman, get out cookstove parts for one guy, grab latrine parts for another, and finally get to throw some pasta on by 1:00pm.

1:30 to 2:00 I “read” my water tests from the day before, which means I count the number of bacteria on each Petri dish that has been treated with water from a house. There are A LOT of fecally-derived bacteria in each dish. As my mentor would say, “the water is chewy with poop.”

Church starts at 2, two buildings down from me, and I head down for the “celebration.” I enjoy church for the community it provides, and also for the time for reflection, but in terms of delivered content, I can’t say I get much out of it… Why? Well, nobody can really read, which makes everything somewhat unintelligible to the gringo who needs his Spanish read with pauses in the right places! Anyway, Church was a hoot this week. We’re talking a great-horned-owl size hoot. Why? The music. There is this guy who recently got a guitar. Apparently, he doesn’t know how to tune it. Also, as he told me, he “just learned by himself.” This turns out to mean that he made up his own chords, which he plays in whatever sequence he chooses, in a rhythm not in time with the song. It’s hard to convey the sound that occurs during a “hymn,” but I would relate it most closely to a nursery with lots of hungry babies. It is full of joy and praise, but, for someone used to an organ and trained singers, it is also very, very entertaining.

Church goes till 4 and then I walk 30 minutes up to “town” to get water test supplies from a freezer where they are stored. I chat with people along the way; learning about how Felipe snuck across the border to work in a Chinese restaurant in Virginia and how everyone is really happy that Barack Obama took the cake. (Maybe that’s why I like it here, because everyone loves Obama!)

I buy 3 “baleadas” (flour tortilla, refriend beans, salty cheese and butter) from an outside, questionably-sanitary foodstand on the way back down. Back home, I eat, wash the stacks of dishes that have been piling up in the busy preceding days, enter some data from my research, call the lady-friend, and turn in around 10pm. It was just another Honduras day!

Love to all,

mateo