Health is money

I've seen two very different worlds related to sickness in the past week and a half. Catherine and I went to the Clinica Stella Maris, a first-rate, first-world, modern and clean and highly professional cross between a doctor's office and a hospital, to get ourselves checked out for parasites. Ever since February we've both had recurring stomach problems--Catherine gets sudden and intensely miserable bouts of diarrhea, takes medicine, gets better, feels fine, and then does it all over again the next month, whereas I never feel quite as bad as she does but almost never feel completely normal either. Sister Teresa said she had parasites for two years once before she realized there was a pattern to her stomach issues and got analyzed. So that's what we're doing. The clinic is over an hour away on the bus, but it's where the sisters go, and as soon as I got there I knew it was worth it to go somewhere really trustworthy. The doctor was very kind, very professional, and acted like he had all the time in the world to talk to you, which was a welcome change from some doctors in the US. (Of course he doesn't do appointments, he just takes people as they come, so after the hour-plus bus ride we had to wait an hour and a half to see him... the good side and the bad side of the Peruvian approach to scheduling.) He even pronounced my name correctly and knew a few English words (like "bloating") to help me describe my issues. Going to the doctor in a foreign language, especially for stomach/bowel issues, means a whole set of fun new vocabulary words!

The doctor's visit was 50 soles, or about 17 dollars; the analyses all together are about 255 soles, or 85 dollars. My insurance with Notre Dame Mission Volunteers is going to reimburse me for most or all of this. Once they get done with the analysis we'll see what parasites we have and then get rid of the pesky little critters.

All this is unbelievably different from what I've seen when accompanying the parish health committee to visit the sick in our pueblo and take them communion. A few women from the parish spend their Thursday afternoons doing this, and the houses they visit range from modest to very poor. Yesterday's patient was a thin old grandmother with doubled-up hands, maybe from arthritis or something like that. She could sit on the edge of her bed but couldn't walk. She wore a hat because she had recently shaved her head to get rid of lice. Her house wasn't really a house at all: she had a little room like a shed, with a lightbulb overhead and cloths shoved into the gaps between the tin roofing and the walls, and a few yards down the hill was another bigger shed that I didn't see inside. A wooden board fence with a swinging door went up the hill to the right of both, and inside it was a sort of yard area at least partially roofed over. (The roofed part that I saw inside may well count as a legitimate house around here, because even nice houses in Lima sometimes have little areas open to the sky above, or whole back walls missing where a room leads right into a backyard. It never rains enough or gets cold enough here to make people seal themselves off completely from the outdoors.) The yard seemed to be where the woman of the house, the patient's daughter, did cooking and laundry. There was laundry strung up on lines everywhere, and farther up the hill a few old couches and bicycles lying around rusting outside. Here and there piles of stones outlined the paths where the daughter and the granddaughter and the dog walked back and forth through their home.

The grandmother, Señora Rosita, was very lucid and in pretty good spirits; her sister-in-law was there visiting her too when we arrived. Her sweet 7-year-old granddaughter hung around in her doorway keeping the dog out and singing songs with us. The daughter was a well-built woman in her 30's who came out from doing her laundry to talk to us. When Señora Rosita complained that she never brought her to church any more, she said firmly, as if she had been over this a million times to different visitors, that she would love to bring her mother to church, but she has no time. Every day she gets up at 3:30 in the morning to cook and take the food to the market to sell by 6 am. After selling all morning she comes back and does house chores and cooks for the family. If she doesn't do all this, she said, "what am I going to give my daughter to eat? The truth is, I'm a single mother. If I don't sell, what am I going to give my mother?" But even after telling us all this, she stayed to listen when the woman I was with told her about a special Mass for the sick, and asked when and where it was just in case she might be able to take her mom. She left us to go back to her laundry with the air of someone who knows her job and is going to do it.

The family seemed to get along well and be more or less in good spirits. The little girl goes to school and she could read the song book I had with me. So they're getting by from day to day. But what killed me was that Señora Rosa told us about the herbal soup she makes to help the pain in her bones, because they can't afford the medication she used to take. "Three for five soles, señorita! It's expensive!" Three for five soles is fifty cents a pill. Fifty cents a pill, if she takes one per day, is one hundred thirty-two dollars and fifty cents a year. After she said that, I had a surreal sense of not understanding the world I was in. The fence, and the dog, and the shed with the grandmother's bed and her wool blankets to keep warm, the strung-up laundry, and a couple of flies buzzing around the door--and more than feeling sorry for them, I felt a confused sort of anger. I didn't get it. Why don't they get a real house? I found myself thinking. Why can't they go get their grandmother some pills for God's sake? It's so easy! You just walk down to the pharmacy and get them! I had an urge to shove a couple hundred dollars into the daughter's hand, wordlessly, not as if it meant anything, but because it meant nothing--because the pile of dollars sitting in my bank account suddenly seemed so worthless to me. Here, just take it, I would say with a look. Your mother needs pills? Buy her a whole year's worth of freaking pills, they're only fifty cents each! How about a real roof for Grandma? I'm not looking to be your benifactress or anything, it's just that it's so simple! Where I come from you just take your money and go buy what you need...

In the face of fifty cents a pill, I don't know what good it really does for me to teach a little English here. (I have taken a "break" from my Communication classes because I had no clue how to teach Camus's The Stranger, and decided I would rather spend my time on other activities than try to design and teach a high school literature curriculum in a foreign language with no control over what texts are read and no guidance from more experienced teachers. Pati understands perfectly and gave me an open invitation to come back whenever I like or not at all. She is a very sweet, generous person.) Who knows whether my efforts will actually improve the lives of any of my students, especially when the progress is so slight and slow, and the ones who say they are interested in more intensive tutoring never show up when they say they will. Maybe they will make a little progress, but after this year (or next), I will eventually go back to the US and leave them. Going to the US is something many people here would like to do, but few can. But for me, it's the easiest thing in the world to go back home--to flash my passport and skip through customs and immigration to a life in abundance where everything I could ever need is always there for me. It seems a little wrong to do so while Señora Rosa is still living in her shed.

I want to swear that I will never look at a $20 bill the same way again. But I probably will, in the future, go back to seeing it as a coffee and a movie instead of a week's worth of dinners for a family.

...in other news, my fourth grade chorus cheers me up every time. They are so cute and they are singing so well.