La Tinta, A Place Nearly As Hot as the Fever I Ran

I've spent the last week in the middle of the jungle. We had a six hour bus ride with more than half that across a dirt, mountainside road. I'm impressed that more vehicles don't fall of the side off these cliffs. One slip of the wheel at nearly any moment and we would have sidelonged in various gorges, catching trees and barbed wire fences along the way. From the moment we stepped out of our air conditioned buses, it was over 90 degrees with Minnesotan humidity until we took the buses back up the dirt road and neared Coban, further north of our location. The bugs were twice as large as you'd ever find in the states. Giant lizards rambled around with horns and green skin. Moths were beautiful and larger than my fists, I found a praying mantis crawling up a wall and scorpions crawling out of my suitcase. Thankfully I avoided being stung.

Sunday night, I started running a fever. By Monday evening all was full fledged. I was running a 102.2 temperature and managed to sleep for almost 48 hours solidly. I was wheezy and coughing and overall in miserable shape until midday Wednesday. However, I avoided an IV by drinking water by the liter. Dropping into the swing of things halfway through the week was slightly difficult for me. By this point, most have developed their position of work for the week and I was starting from scratch. I had ample reason to float for the rest of the week. I spent some time attemtping to translate in the dental clinic and popped in and out of the medical clinics as well.

One of the highlights was watching the marvelous Paul Schultz work. A plastic surgeon from St. Cloud and the father of a dear friend of mine, Meredith, Paul can put people back together like I´ve never seen before. I watched him work on a severe cleft lip and pallate Wednesday afternoon. One and a half year old Oscar suddenly had a new face, and I can´t even describe to you the look on his mother´s face when he came out of surgery. A woman in her young twenties who spoke only Kekche, a native dialect, she couldn´t speak and just kept looking. Awestruck at her son´s closed lips and with another newborn baby on her hip, she stayed near him for the next several days. It was entirely joyful to see Oscar squeak and dribble food from his mouth a day later. He had to figure out how to eat all over again. I can´t help but realize how close to my own age his mother was and how frequently that is the case. A little girl from the village asked if I had a boyfriend and was shocked when I told her I was twenty and flying solo. That doesn´t happen in the villages here. You get married and have a family, and hope that your six or eight children make it past year five.

Because of one person, this little boy´s life will be so different. The work Paul does makes me crave the ability to impact others in an equally drastic manner. I just don´t think that I could live with myself in the states if I had to perform lyposuction and breast implants the other 345 days of the year when I wasn´t in Guatemala. But this man literally puts people back together. He can give a man who´s fallen in a fire and fused his hand shut, functioning fingers again. We´re even built with extra tendons in our hands, which, when transplanted into a faulty digit, create new opportunity for movement. It´s amazing, and while I´ve always been sure of my study, his work makes me consider other paths. The question was poised to me recently if I´d ever considered the medical field. I gave my blanketed no, I was satisfied to solely watch. However, I suddenly am not so sure.

I´m beginning to realize I´m learning much more than I ever anticipated I would. Of course I subconciously knew that would happen. It´s amazing what happens when you have a crappy week out in the field. I was in a wretchedly hot environment for a week. Sweating while sitting at eight o clock in the morning is not my idea of a great time. Yet I spent a week there. The difference is that I had the option to leave. These people living in literal shanties, don´t have that option. That´s the difference between my situation in La Tinta and theirs. I have hot summers as well, but I have a functioning stove, an air conditioner... My six membered family lives in three separate locations, and my gradmothers add an additional two. We have floors. We have vehicles. We have ice. Now place these eight people in a tin walled, eight by ten foot space and you have the dwelling place of my individuals I saw along that dirt road this week.

And as we passed by in our air conditioned busses, and the gringos (slang for Americans) took pictures out the window, people ran down the road and families smiled out their dimly lit doorways. Dirt covered kids with torn tshirts or no tshirts at all, played with each other in the street and waved us on, grinning.