Sunday, April 26, 2009

The end.

The time has come. Time to pack our backpacks one last time, to make our way to one last airport, fill out one last immigration form, and close the chapter on this incredible journey.

To say it has changed me can hardly capture the essence of this experience. As I sit here, at one last internet cafe, I am flooded with memories from the past 3 1/2 months.

Bustling through the halls of Hospital Hipolito Unanue, bouncing between operating rooms. Comforting crying post-op babies. Listening to parents and families who saved up all year long to bring their kids to the hospital. Walking the winding streets of Cuzco. Accidentally crashing a funeral. The majestic Andes peaks. Making hostels home. Getting my bag stolen in Ecuador. Biking 26 miles through the Andes towards the Amazon. Being in an ecuadorian music video. Seeing Bridget and hanging out with the amazing Padròn family. Switchbacks. Sleeping in the airport (twice). The inspiring people we met in Guatemala. Weighing children in El Fortìn. Finding spirituality. Finding peace. Finding myself.

So what have I learned? I have learned that strength, humility, and hope are three virtues that can get you through most any tough times. I have learned that no matter where you are, if you have an open heart, you can make anywhere feel like home. I have learned that you can tell a lot about a country by how it treats it´s elderly, poor, women, children and marginalized. And I have learned never to underestimate the kindness of strangers.

I am so blessed to have been given this opportunity; a truely life changing experience. Now all that is left is to hop on that plane, hug my family, and start putting to practice all that gifts that this trip has bestowed upon me.

Friday, April 24, 2009

And the clock ticks down...

How time flies.

We are ending our time in Latin America where it began last time: in Costa Rica, the land of breathtaking natural beauty and ¨pura vida¨(literally ¨pure life¨- the sort of national catch-phrase). Whereas Nicaragua is abundant in beauty of a different sort, Costa Rica prides itself on its natural resources, a pioneer for ecotourism, and the country with the highest standard of living in central america (and one of the highest in the hemisphere). Amazing how two countries so close in proximity can seem worlds away.

I have always felt more drawn to Nicaragua as a country than Costa Rica for several reasons. In Nicaragua I felt as though I was part of a living history- the past (indigenous heritage, dictatorship, revolution, civil war, U.S. interventionism) is all still very alive and present. While Nicaragua is afflicted with arguably some of the worst problems in the hemisphere, it also has a unique ¨we can prevail¨ optimism, due in large part to the fact that it was largely the youth that succesfully took down a dictatorship in the 1980´s. The natural beauty and resilience of the Nicaraguan people is evident no matter where you go.

Costa Rica; with its picturesque beaches, lush rainforest, and countless animal species, has been called a mini ecosystem all its own. No wonder this is such a tourist destination: it´s beautiful! We went first to Manuel Antonio, a spectacularly beautiful beach town surrounded by rainforest, and got to visit my cousin Miquela and her baby Bella, who live there.

Then, we went to Bagaces, a small town where Cory and I studied abroad two years ago. While I may have felt more at home as a country in Nicaragua, I never felt as welcomed and part of a family than with my Costa Rican host family. We stayed with our host families again, and it was so great to return to that feeling of home, and to have it extended to Katie (who my family promptly adopted as another daughter).

Now we are in Samara, the last leg of the journey, the final stop on this life-changing trip. It is a quiet beautiful beach town, and its tranquility and peace are just the right thing to aid our anxieties about returning to home responsabilities (aka, finding a job in this economy). But we are trying to live in the present, soaking up as much of this experience as we possibly can.

While it sounds clichè, I cannot convey how life-altering this trip has been. I feel as though I have grown more in the past three months than I ever thought that I could, and am becoming a woman that I think my parents would be proud of.

This life is so beautiful, and it´s never too late to go out and grab it. Again, the quote from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button rings true:

¨For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again. ¨

Samara, Costa Rica
My street in Bagaces, Costa Rica

Sunday, April 12, 2009

The sun sets on Nicaragua

As the sun sets on our final day in Nicaragua, I cannot help to look back on the profound experiences of the past two weeks spent in El Fortín. As I said before, we were working in public health, taking height and weight measurements of the children. This was challenging on many levels (none the least of which being the unbearable heat), but incredibly rewarding as well. We walked down the cracked dusty earth roads and went to every house in both communities in El Fortín, took measurements of 10 year olds with stunted growth due to malnutrition and screaming 9 month old babies with potbellies weighing only 8 pounds. It was an eye-opener, much more so than if this work had been done in a clinic. Actually visiting these families where they live, we could see such a bigger picture- where this malnutrition comes from, how these children get parasites, and the bigger questions: how are these families surviving? And, on a governmental health level, why are these people (a mere 10 km outside of Granada) forgotten?

On our last day in El Fortìn, we went to the beach with many of the kids from the community. We had a blast swimming in the (uh, polluted) waters of Lake Nicaragua with Estefanì, Juancito, Betito and others. The kids were having a blast too, and at one point, I looked over at 6 year old Betito grinning ear to ear, swimming with his homemade floaties- two empty 2 liter soda bottles. Sitting in the gently rocking waves, sunlight dancing off the water, my face fell as I realized that this innocent happy boy would have to fight hard not to become one of the other faces of El Fortìn: the adolecent and teen boys eyes bloodshot from huffing glue and doing drugs. However unfair, the cards are stacked against him.

There is a quote by Marcel Proust that says that ¨The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.¨ This whole trip has given me new eyes when it comes to the issue of poverty. I see it whenever I look out my window to scores of shantytowns that, while the country borders or even continents may have changed, bear an unmistakable likeness of resilience and dispair. How many people have I seen living in one room, dirt floor tin shack communities built into the sides of hills outside of town, without electricity or running water? How many elderly women have I seen on the streets, abandoned by families, begging for a peso or a few of our french fries? How many young men have I passed with bloodshot eyes and a glazed over expression, clothes hanging off of their skeletal bodies? And in every single country, how many, many street children have I seen? From the Incan girls in Peru, wandering the streets of Cuzco, posing for pictures and selling their culture in order to survive. To the 10 year old Mayan girls in Guatemala, carrying their baby brothers on their backs and taking care of their other siblings all day while their parents work. To emaciated boys in Nicaragua running barefoot through the streets, peddling ceramics, gum, or simply asking for money.

For so many of these people, they were never given a chance to realize their full potential. They were born into a system, not merely political, but social, that ignores and marginalizes the vast majority of the populace, making it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to escape their circumstance. You are born into the slums, you die in the slums. If these children could easily go to school, if the young men and women could get jobs that pay living wages, if people of all ages were educated about health (sexual health, water and food born pathogens, and preventable diseases, for example), and if their governments could invest in their people, perhaps these people would have a better shot. I firmly believe that there are certain things that all human beings deserve: access to clean water, food, shelter, healthcare, a decent education, and employment opportunities. I hope for a better future. But in the meantime, I will work towards it, because hope alone doesn´t feed empty stomachs, and optimism doesn´t cure disease.


Monday, April 6, 2009

A Prayer by Archbishop Oscar Romero

While working at the mission in Guatemala, I came across this prayer that was written by Archbishop Oscar Romero. For those of you who don´t know, Archbishop Romero was the Archbishop of El Salvador during the civil war who denounced the repression and genocide of the Salvadorian people. He was assasinated on March 24th 1980 while saying mass. This prayer speaks a lot to liberation theology and really spoke to me.


A Prayer by Archbishop Oscar Romero

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.

Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.

No prayer fully expresses our faith.

No confession brings perfection.

No pastoral visit brings wholeness.

No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.

No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.

This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.

Friday, April 3, 2009

El Fortín

In a country that is ranked second poorest in the Western Hemisphere, on a continent with the greatest gap between rich and poor in the world, lies the community of El Fortín. It is still amazing to think that this somewhat isolated country community lies a mere 10 minutes from the hustle and bustle of Granada.

The two couldn´t be more different. Step into Granada and you are stepping into the same conundrum that plagues most tourist spots-- the beautiful architecture, horsedrawn carriages, new restaurants and bars catering to foreign clientele, all of which try, but cannot mask, the extreme poverty that actually lives and breathes beneath the surface. Elderly women begging for scraps of your food. Teenage boys huffing glue in the park. Barefoot children in ragged clothes who should be in school wandering the streets without destination or purpose.

All the while, this country is one of my very favorites. Yes, there is poverty. Yes, there are dire circumstances. However, there is something very unique to Nicaragua. Something intangible, but can be felt in the warmth and love we have (and are) experiencing in El Fortín.

We arrived on Monday with aprehensions. We hadn´t heard back from María Teresa, our contact, so we werent sure if our host stays were secure, and we still didn´t know exactly what she wanted us to do. On top of that, there were other questions. How had things changed since we began our project there two and a half years ago? Or worse, for the sake of the project, how had things remained the same?

El Fortín, as I have said, couldn´t be more different from Granada. Whereas Granada is full of the deafening sounds of microbuses, bachata music, chicken buses, and street vendors, there is an initial eerie quiet when you arrive, exacerbated by the silence of the people who live there. There isn´t a lot of talking going on at my host family´s house. The very first time I came to El Fortín, I got to my family´s house and they grabbed me a chair, invited me to sit down, and they proceeded to make a semi-circle of chairs around me and stare at me. Just stare. No questions of who I was or why I was there. Awkward silence. Being someone who, lets face it, likes to talk and has a tendency to fill silent voids with conversation, this was a shocker. But, it also made me think that perhaps this is just an environment where silence isn´t something to be avoided- you don´t talk unless you have something to say.

Our work for the time we are there is dedicated to public health. As I have said, the children in this community were tested for parasites last year, and every single one of them tested positive. To put this in perspective, there are about 400 houses in both areas of El Fortín, many of which house several families. Thats a lot of kids.

We have been going house by house taking height and weight measurements of the children. This is crucial information to determine of the kids are malnurished, underdeveloped or have intestinal parasites. It was truly eye-opening walking house by house, opening the barbed wire and wooden stake fences, approaching houses made of cinder block or wood or tin, and asking tired mothers or grandmothers if we could weigh the kids running around the house. One house that we approached had seven kids (the eldest of which was 11) and no parents.

Some kids were healthier than others. I´m no medical expert, but it didn´t take much to look at these kids, look at their measurements, and know that they are terribly malnourished. Children with skeletal arms and legs and the caracteristic potbelly, so often an indicator for parasites, or malnourishment. This information, once sent to the government health agencies, will hopefully bring more help to this community that desperately needs it.

The situation sounds dire, and perhaps when talking of health and economics, it is. But there is another side to El Fortín, and I see it everyday when I have legions of kids following us around to play with us. They look like the happiest kids in the world, and it pains me that they have so much of life stacked against them. Maybe this was our bigger mission with LASED- to give these kids a fighting chance to escape circumstance. But unlike other programs, we realize that a diversified approach is the only way to success-- families need income to afford to send their kids to school, kids need to go to school in order to succeed, but kids cannot succeed on empty stomachs. Or when they are sick.

But for now, I am enjoying life tremendously. From feeling super popular with the 7 year olds, to taking bucket showers in the sun, I remember why I love this place so much. Maybe some people here don´t talk much, but when it comes to making us feel so welcome and part of the family, they don´t need to.