America vs. Honduras

This week started off interestingly with the football/ soccer game of USA vs. Honduras.  I showed up to the party clad in a red, white, and blue polo in honor of my beloved country among a sea of blue and white representing Honduras.  Everyone in the room, including some Americans were rooting for the Hondurans, which I would have been rooting for other than the fact that I really couldn’t help but feel the patriotic zeal of supporting my home in a foreign country.  This game would determine who would move forward in qualifying for the World Cup in South Africa in 2010, which would mean a lot to a country like Honduras with such a complicated and difficult political environment.  In the end, the US triumphed over really somber Hondurans (however, they qualified later on in the week making this the first time the country has qualified for the World Cup since the 80′s….. it became a National Holiday!)

The game occurred on Saturday night, but I really did not know that it would foreshadow the week that would soon unfold.  I started my week off at San Benito, which I have come to recognize as a haven for my desire to practice medicine in the future.  The day seemed to go by pretty normally minus the fact that there was a new nursing student who was shadowing the nurse Lidia that I have been helping on Tuesday mornings.  I remember within the first few minutes, the amount of frustration I had when I was trying to explain how to take a blood pressure, or weigh a patient and take basic vitals to a nursing student who should have already known all of this information before starting clinical rounds.  I remember thinking that it was just the education system and how in the US, things would be entirely different.

When a patient came in that had both arms bandaged and one eye covered, I was extra careful when taking all the vital information, and even more perplexed as to her condition and fearful mannerisms in my presence.  I later found out that she had been recovering from injuries that were inflicted when her husband decided to take a machete to her body.  After the initial shock of her tragic story, I immediately got frustrated again with how such an animal would not see the light of day for a very long time if the same case were in the US.

I would have to say my ultimate, but most rewarding frustration came the next day when I was shadowing in the clinic with Dr. Carlos.  Patient after patient came in with the same illnesses; we saw children with impetigo, and various dermatological fungi.  The funny thing is that every single child had the same thing in common….. they were all filthy, with dirty fingernails.  Dr. Carlos later explained to me that he instructs parents to wash their children everyday and make sure that their nails are cut and clean, but this is all done in vain because the parents do not listen or understand really what to do.

The public health student jumped at the opportunity to prove that primary prevention is absolutely necessary.  All of these health problems are associated with uncleanliness, and can be remedied without that much cost…… just a bar of soap.  Since the parents chose not to listen, their children got sick, and needed to rely on free medical care when they could have avoided the problem in the first place by simply bathing their children.

I remember feeling so helpless and overwhelmed and frustrated with the situation.  I remember thinking how could parents not know how to bathe or properly clean their children?  How could people be so ignorant of the health risks of not washing their hands regularly?  In the States, cleanliness was a part of basic grade school education, why is it so different here?

I pondered on this for a while and was chasing my tail, moving no where.  Then I found the grace that I was seeking.  The problem is not the education, the parents, or the people.  The problem was actually me and my judgments.  I had been spending all of this time judging the infrastructure, finding someone to blame, and judging the poor that I was serving.  I was adding to the problem, and not resolving it or investigating a better way to serve more lovingly and compassionately.  I was standing on my elaborate pedestal of privilege, with my Rutgers University degree.  I was seeking out all the bad that there was, and how in America things would be different.  More importantly, I was looking for conformation of cultures.

What I did not realize was that I cannot hide behind my college degree, or my fancy resume in a country like this.  The people here already know that I have more opportunity and freedom in my native country……… but this does not give me the right to judge them.  I found myself doing to other people the very thing that I hate.  I am not the person to say that they are wrong, and I am right, or that society here should be more like the society that I was raised.  I was wasting opportunities to love and appreciate people for who they are, not what they have done or neglected to do.  If I want to heal people, I have to first learn not to judge them first and heal them after.  In judging, am I not adding to that initial pain or injury that I am trying to fix?

This was a very humbling lesson, which is one of many that I look forward to learning on this journey.  I have to learn how to loose myself more, getting rid of every aspect of my life that I used to hide behind in order to protect myself from becoming vulnerable.  Love and compassion require a certain level of vulnerability that I have not quite allowed myself to enter.  The week that started with a competition between two nations soon manifested into a mindset of superiority that was only resolved in learning that in the real world when USA vs. Honduras, no one wins and no one loses.

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