After 7 months getting talked-up by Mateo, Kirsten was already a living legend in San Jose before she even arrived. When she swooped in on her umbrella, though, she really confirmed her place in San Jose lore forever! OK, so the umbrella was just for the sun (as many women-of-means use in Hondu), but even without a flying entry, Kirsten did indeed live up to her legend.A few photos can best tell the story of our wonderful, fun and full 9 days together…
It’s always interesting how having another person from “outside” makes you notice things differently. For example, the sunsets. I never have/take the time to stop and appreciate the sunsets, but while Kirsten was here, we made the most of the opportunity to stop, appreciate and have a sunset conversation.
This is my neighbor’s house in the evening. Kirsten took a fondness to my neighbor’s dog, “Tigre.” Despite my not-so-subtle objection, she tried to revive his scrawny frame with a few morsels from our dinner… on several occasions. Lucky dog!
Kirsten didn’t waste any time getting to know everyone… not that she really had any choice! On the first evening she was here, church got out and she was suddenly the center of attention for a very curious assembly of some 25 people, a veritable “who’s who of San Jose.” She handled it bravely, and even remembered a few of the names. On the third day, we went to the Sunday market in Rancho Quemado (the closest “town” to me on the “big road”). At no moment during the market were there any less than 20 eyes on her! We tried getting a representative photo with a little crowd of teenagers hovering around her, but this is the best we could get.
But, you ask, what did we “do” during the week? Think “pinguinos y pies” (penguins and feet)…
First: Penguins. Prior to coming to San Jose, Kirsten translated “The Penguin Song” into Spanish, with the hope of teaching it to kids at the various San Jose schools. “The Penguin Song” is a camp-type song about how to walk like a penguin, i.e. right arm, left arm, right leg, left leg, move the head, turn in circles. It’s VERY catchy, and when sung and danced by two gringos, VERY entertaining.
So, we set up a visit to the San Jose Centro school and the Portillon school, and showed up to each with a whole program of education and fun.
We would start by reading a children’s book, Kirsten in Spanish and I in English. We were pleasantly surprised to find that ALL the kids, from Kindergarten through 6th grade, were absolutely entranced by this. After, we donated the books to the schools for the kids to read themselves.
Next, I would put on my “doctor” hat and do a little lesson about water cleanliness. I would hand out a bunch of the water sample plates from my recent research (like the ones I have posted photos of on this blog before) and ask them to tell me what colors they saw. Once I had a good list, I would hand out the clean plates, and we would discuss the difference and how you can make your water change from colorful to clean. Little by little, San Jose is becoming a community of water health experts!
And last, but surely not least, Kirsten would teach a little about penguins, and then we would do “The Penguin Song.” It was HILARIOUS! Perhaps as good as seeing the kids grin and spin like penguins, though, was the aftermath… In the following days, as we would walk around “town,” Kirsten and I started hearing, yelled in little, hidden voices, “pinguinos!” Her legend grows.
And number two: Feet. We walked a lot. Despite the very un-Rochester heat, Kirsten braved the mountains of San Jose as we did a bunch of follow-up visits for the research. Here she is, descending on the far side of Guanacaste, in an isolated region known as “La Pimienta.” We tried to make it look steep, but still it’s steeper than it looks. Ask her.
Victorina Sanchez and her 3 daughters. Kirsten and I waited at this house for Victorina to return from gathering firewood, and in the meantime, Kirsten had a great conversation with the daughters. Different people reacted very differently to Kirsten: some would ignore her and just address me, others would just stare at her and say nothing, and others (mostly the women) would be open to her attempts to start conversation.
I’m speaking for someone besides myself here, but I would say this variable reaction may have been one of the most difficult parts of the trip for her. Us Americans are, culturally, outgoing conversationalists with equal respect for men and women. To be in San Jose, where the culture is quiet and reserved and the women are oppressed, is quite the shift.
This is Felicita, Francisca, and Mariano, from left to right. Since this picture was taken, Mariano has died. Why? Putting it as gently as possible, Mariano died simply because he was poor and uneducated in a poor, uneducated and underserved community in the mountains of Honduras.
Mariano was one of three patients diagnosed with Tuberculosis (TB) by the brigade last November, along with my good friend Lacero. Lacero got proper treatment and is now entirely healthy, cured, happy and back at work. Mariano went to the hospital, where he stayed for a month while he received treatment for his TB and his lung that had collapsed as a result of the advanced TB. In December, the discharge note described him as “improving,” and instructed him to come back in a month to get the next phase of his TB treatment and to check his chest wound (from the chest tube placed to fix his collapsed lung). Unfortunately, neither Mariano nor his wife can read, and apparently the hospital staff didn’t communicate very well; so, when they left the hospital, they thought the month of TB treatment they had been given on discharge was everything they needed for him to be healed. In fact, he needed another 5-7 months of carefully observed treatment.
From December until March, all I heard about Mariano from those in town was that he had gone to the hospital and that he was now back home.
I ran into Mariano’s wife a day before Kirsten came and she asked if the brigade had a program to give food to sick people. She said she needed it for her husband who was “really skinny and wasting away.” We don’t have such a program, but I found some old (but still good) food supplements in the store room. So, while Kirsten and I were out by Mariano’s house for filter visits we stopped by to check in and see if this food help was really needed.
What we found was a man on his deathbed. His room smelled like the Mother Teresa Hospice in Ethiopia, with that unmistakable smell of a wasting-away human body. His wife said his treatment hadn’t worked, and since January he had been getting worse. Beyond that, she didn’t know anything about his condition. He had stopped swallowing solids a few days ago and she was now feeding him Coca Cola as a last resort.
I asked for the hospital discharge sheets, which she had but couldn’t read, and thereby gathered the history of miscommunication and unfinished treatment I have just told.
Kirsten and I hid our anger and grief and asked if they still wanted to try to improve his condition. They very much so did, and so we gave them the drinkable food supplements and arranged a home visit, ASAP, by the local nurse, to get the ball rolling on starting treatment once again. He died before the nurse got there.
This is the face, the story, and for us, the smell, of one of those “millions of preventable deaths” that you hear about in the news. Personally, we couldn’t quite decide which bothered us more: that Mariano had died of an easily treatable disease or that his family was so accustomed to loss and hardship that they felt their father’s death at age 49 was acceptable.
We’re going to do what we can to make sure that nobody from San Jose is ever dropped by the system like this again.
Back on the road, here was a family at another home visit, the interview nicely done in Spanish by Kirsten. Note the beautiful purple filter!
Kirsten has a way with kids. Here she is getting a rise out of Veronica and Sandra, two girls she had befriended at school and then found again at their house during a visit. Nice shades, Sandra!
And of course, we played some soccer. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say “of course,” because I had only played a few times before Kirsten’s arrival. But anyway, Kirsten befriended these little guys and then we went to play an evening soccer game at their house. (They are, from left to right, Santos, Sandra, Paulino, Marcos and Priscilla, ages 13, 9, 14, 5 and 6, respectively. Yes, seriously, those are the ages, and yes, that’s what malnutrition will do to you.) We, and they I believe, had a blast! They were adorable, loved Kirsten, enjoyed the attention and were very respectful.
In the end, I would wager to say that the soccer game was a fitting activity for our final night in San Jose. It captured well the relationships, connections and local savvy that Kirsten picked up, and the shared adventure and joy that we both experienced during her time in San Jose.
Until Kirsten comes again in May, I look forward to running into little reminders of her around San Jose as the kids yell “pinguino!” and adults rave about how “bonita” was “Christina.”
-mateo
