Beyond Evanston

Madeline and I on the steps of the MAS clinic, in the little village of Tlapa where we spent four days last weekend. (Madeline would be the former professional figure skater. Seriously.)

We left for Tlapa early Thursday morning. The drive was six hours, hot and bumpy and up and around mountains. Dude: mountains.

Things about mountains: being able to see the shadows of clouds. Cities, spread messily in valleys, crawling up the sides of hills, with the houses looking poorer and more unfinished as you go up. Little shops built beside the road - only there's not enough room, so they extend the roadside with a concrete foundation supported in the front by the edge of the road, and supported in the back by extremely shady-looking concrete supports.

We stayed in a "half-star" hotel which was actually quite nice except for the fact that nothing in our room (curtains, toilet, sink) worked. But hey, TV! Friday morning we were driven through the bumpy, dirty streets of Tlapa to a clinic (where the pic was taken), and promptly told to come back the next day, so we went to visit a school instead, where I personally made 20 children cry.

More on that: our service project (one of the reasons we were in Tlapa, in addition to just seeing what life was like outside of Mexico City) was to check on the nutritional status of some of the children seen by the clinic. So we measured height, weight and blood iron levels. On Friday I was part of the blood-drawing team: six of us in lab coats and rubber gloves, taking blood samples from 85 extremely scared, non-English-speaking kids. Worse: we had no idea what we were doing, and there weren't enough extra supplies for us to practice on each other. The two med students from the Universidad Panamericana explained the procedure (swipe the finger clean, jab, fill capillary tube with blood, comfort child) and we got started, in teams of two (which turned into teams of 3 or 4 as the kids got progressively more freaked out and harder to handle.)

Imagine: the room filled with screaming children, being held by their mothers; us prying open clenched figures and praying under our breaths that they'd stay still long enough so we'd only have to jab once in order to get enough for the sample ; everyone speaking in broken Spanish. Top five phrases used:

1. No llores! [don't cry!]
2. No te va a pasar nada. [nothing's going to happen to you.] (this one was a good one for the kids who were dragged in by their mothers screaming "They're going to cut me!")
3. Está bien, está bien. [it's ok, it's ok.]
4. Es muy rápido. [it's very fast.]
5. Te duele un poquitito. [it's going to hurt a very, very little bit.]

It was a little traumatic (more for the kids than for us, but for us too.) I kept wondering whether I would want to do this for a living. Actually I felt pretty good about how the morning went considering the circumstances: I like panic, mayhem. I function better when everyone around me is freaking out. (I think) As in, when everyone's gloves are covered with blood and the room is filled with shrieks and we're all looking at each other stunned like, how did it all come to this?

It's this feeling that makes me wonder if I shouldn't be a doctor. Shouldn't I be a little more horrified that I am in this place, a gringa doctor with no experience, forced into this situation where I CAN'T provide the best possible care? Am I getting some kind of vicarious thrill from the panic when I should be horrified that the situation even has to be this way? After a weekend of chasing thoughts like this around in my head I got tired. My brain needs a nap.

Normally, I use other like-minded people's brains as extensions of my own, which keeps me from getting caught in the hamster wheel of myself. Even in Uganda, most of my processing was done with the help of e-mails from home, with online chats with my advisor, eventually with long car-ride discussions with my host dad. Here I haven't found a similar network of brains to use. I haven't been nearly as home-connected as I was in Uganda, partly because I need to less - it's less overwhelming, less lonely, less foreign - and partly because I don't have time. So I tend to get stuck and stop processing things at all and start to go rotten inside, like an egg.

Buuuut this happens at home too. I need to learn tricks and disciplines to help get things moving again I guess. Like mental laxatives.

I am sorry for that horrifying image.