A rainy day and a dentist

Last Thursday it rained way more than is usual in Lima. The normal winter precipitation here is a fine mist, but this was actually a real (light) rain. It began during the night and by 8 am, when I was supposed to be leaving for the school to work with Liliana, there was a whole confusion over a nearby school's religion class coming into our church to pray, because (1) Señora Sofía had not arrived to open the church for them, and (2) the church floor was covered with large puddles of rain dripping in through the roof and falling through the open windows. And the religion teacher was standing outside my door in a hoodless fleece jacket getting wet, because limeños aren't used to covering up in the rain (they don't usually have enough rain to be worth putting a raincoat on for.)

I got to the school and some of the students were sweeping water into the gutters on the second floor with brooms. (The "hallways" of this school aren't inside, only the classrooms are roofed over, and between the classrooms you're walking in the open air. Some of the houses around here are like this too--they'll have a second floor accessible only by an outdoor staircase, or no roof over the walkway between the living room and the bathroom, etc.)

In the Adelante class, Liliana couldn't concentrate because her tooth hurt. Sara the teacher did her concerned-frown-nod. "Yes, she's been like that since Monday! I've told her, she has to go to the dentist! See, Liliana? Liliana, if you don't go to the dentist it's going to keep hurting!" Liliana opened her mouth to show me which one hurt, and I saw a whole bunch of gray discoloring on various teeth. I'm no dentist, but the situation sure looked bad. She said she'd never been to a dentist. I thought, in all likelihood it's because she can't pay for it. So I went to talk to Estela, who in the mornings works as an auxiliar in the school. Estela said that the parish health committee could help with the cost of a dentist's visit. And the coordination began: i.e. Kathleen runs all over creation (well, all over Tupac) for the next two days trying to get Liliana into a dentist's chair.

Estela did most of the actual talking. Liliana, do you have insurance? Yes. (the government-sponsored seguro that anyone can enroll in.) Have your parents ever taken you to the doctor? Yes. Did they ever take you to a dentist? No. Does your tooth hurt right now? Yes. Is your mother at home right now? Yes. Estela goes to ask permission from Gaby to take Liliana home and talk to her mom--to "twist the mother's arm a little, to get her to take her in." Permission granted. But when I went up to get Liliana, she got up from her desk and burst out crying. She didn't want to leave. "If I don't go to school my dad gets mad!--But Liliana, you have permission to go, this is your health, etc!--No, no, don't go tell my mom, don't say anything! My mom'll hit me! Don't say anything!"

Estela sat down across from the crying girl, leaned back, crossed one leg over her knee, and looked at her. Liliana sits next to a mirror on her classroom wall, and in that mirror I saw Estela's face. Her frown was solemn, like a judge gazing down on a poor, powerless defendant; but behind the firm lines of her face there was an immeasurable sadness. The quiet little middle-aged sierran woman, poor as any of her neighbors here in Tupac, suddenly looked like a stern queen moved by compassion for the girl's suffering.
Your mom will hit you, said Estela.
Uh-huh! My mom's not good to me!
Who is good to you, Liliana?
Nobody!
Your dad?
He lives somewhere else!
... and so on. And in front of my eyes, Estela proceeded to calm Liliana down. Sometimes, Liliana, she said, we mothers get angry and hit and yell, but it's only because we're angry. In her heart your mother keeps loving you. You were her baby, you were in her tummy, when you were little she fed you, she gave you your clothes, she wrapped you up and carried you when you cried. She still loves you. Sometimes a mother's mouth can say, Get out of here, I don't love you any more!... but it's just our anger talking. In our hearts we keep loving our children. Don't worry, I'm not going to take you home right now. You stay in your class and study. Ok?

I thought, once again this woman has shown me what God is like. Reminded us where the love is in a broken place, rescued some compassion from suffering; done justice in listening, from her position of power, to the powerless. She has a surprising habit of doing that...

Estela and I went by ourselves to talk to the mom, who by now I was imagining as at least half ogre. We had to ask directions to her house because the family has no telephone to call; Estela asked in the corner shops for the family so-and-so, with a daughter who walks with a kind of limp (Liliana seems to have one leg a little longer than the other.) People said, aaaah ya, there's a girl like that on the next street, go ask around there... and I shook my head and followed, thinking of how I used to locate places in the US using things like addresses and street names and MapQuest. Finally we found the house. The mom opened the door, and far from being an ogre, she had a very nice face and a quiet if somewhat distant manner. Estela starts talking.--Oh, I've tried to take her to the dentist, says the mom. But she doesn't let the doctors treat her! She's nervous, and those male doctors in the seguro, they grab her mouth like this and it hurts, and she doesn't let them! The private clinic where my insurance is, they're women doctors, they're better, but that's 15 soles. (about 5 dollars.)

So the public seguro, 4 soles, has bad doctors, and anything else costs too much. I thought immediately of my dentist, Patricia, who all the sisters go to. She's young, friendly, sweet, smart, the gentlest dentist ever, and does excellent work... and just last week she charged me 135 soles to fill 4 tiny little pre-cavities. Wow. After leaving Liliana's house I said goodbye to Estela and went to talk to Sister Teresa, who said that yes, Pati might be willing to help out for cheap, plus there's been a donation to the school of $100 to be used for the children's health. So I called Pati and left a message that I'd like to talk to her.

Then I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning up water with brooms, dustpans, and buckets, first from the floor of the church, then from the roof of our house, where a puddle accumulated over the kitchen was dripping through and getting our cabinets all wet. I can't even imagine what the rain had done to the houses made of estera bamboo matting. I would have seen it firsthand if I'd gone with the parish ladies to visit Agusto, who they reported to be sleeping under a plastic tarp draped over his bed, because his bedroom was turning into a lake... but I half-purposely took too long cleaning the water off our roof to be able to go. I think I was a bit psychologically worn out by the whole dentist escapade in the morning, and by the stories Estela was telling me as we walked of her childhood living in poverty in the sierra.

The next day I went to see Patricia. She, being an angel, agreed cheerfully to treat Liliana at the cost of her materials only. So it was back to the school to tell Estela and back to the mom's house to tell the mom, and later in the afternoon I met the whole family when Liliana's mother brought her down with her three- and one-year-old brothers, and I showed them where the dentist's office is across from the park. The group of them came down from their house to the park on foot, about a 20-minute walk, with the baby slung across the mother's back in a brightly colored cloth, sierran-style, and the 3-year-old running all over the place and refusing to hold his mother's or his sister's hand.

The whole thing surprised me by being so difficult to coordinate--no telephone in Liliana's house, no car for the mom to drive them to the park in, just a lot of running around on foot and passing messages person to person. In the end Liliana had to go back several times and one tooth was taken out completely, but Pati was wonderful with her and reassured her when she started to cry (I was present for that first interview), and the mom was responsible in bringing her back again and again. And since then there hasn't been any real rain in Tupac.