La Chureca

Well, La Chureca was today. It was about what I expected. I had mentally prepared myself for what I was going to see, but it makes no difference until you´re actually there. No photograph, video, or description really does a place like that justice. It always seems distant, and strange. It´s easy to see the people who live there as something else, not quite people almost, just distant ideas of people. Once you´re there, however, they become people. Real people with real hopes and real dreams. The people in the dump were just like any other person I´ve ever met. There was a real sense of community, these were not isolated people in a dump, but a group of people who came together and were happy. Astonishingly happy. After it was all said and done, I felt bad about the conditions, but that feeling was attenuated by their happiness. How people with so little, surrounded by trash, near starvation, are happy, while Americans with big TV´s, cars, floors made of something other than dirt, are miserable, is beyond my ability to comprehend.

That being said, something hit me like a truck today. I spend a good portion of the afternoon in a daze, lost in my own head trying to find an answer to a question I´d never considered before. Jose Manuel is a child here at Hogar Belen who is profoundly disabled both mentally and physically. His legs are permanently crossed due to malformation of his hip and knees, almost like a pretzel, but his knees touch and he appears as an unpsite down ¨T¨ with his feet at the ends, he is incapable of speech or any other communication other than moans and grunts. He sits in his crib all day every day. It hit me, that if I bust my butt for the next 10 years and become an excellent surgeon, what can I do for a child like this? Maybe I could let his legs move more, he´d be easier to clean the workers tell me, maybe I could free the arms that are stuck immobile at his sides, but then what? He´ll still just sit all day, we can do nothing more. Modern medicine with all it´s might, cannot cure Jose Manuel. What´s the point? Then, while reading my book, Clear and Present Danger, by Tom Clancy, I came across a passage. Jack Ryan is thinking about his dying friend and says:

¨Where do they get the courage? It was one thing to fight against people. Ryan had done that. But to fight against death itself, knowing that you must ultimately lose, but still fighting. Such was the nature of the medical profession.¨

Then it was clear. It didn´t matter. So what if I can´t cure Jose Manuel. If I can, after my ten years of hard work, change his life just a little, then it will be worth it. In the end, death wins, in the mean-time, we will fight as hard as we can not only to delay his inevitable arrival, but to make the time as good as it can be. Even if that just means Jose Manuel can be more easily cleaned and maybe lay on his side for a change. That´s medicine.

Nate