So. It's been over a month since I wrote last. Since then, I've gone home, flown across the country, had a college reunion (weird to say that!), finished interviews, and come back, and assisted my first brigade!
As always, time moves both incredibly slowly and quickly at the same time. The pace of daily life seems agonizingly slow sometimes, even though there's always a ton to do, and so much has already happened in the mere week or so I've been back. Most of us (Ashley, Karla, Jess, Kaitlin, and I) came in from the airport with 2 brigades--"mine," a one-week undergrad group from UDayton, and another brigade of nursing students from Minnesota.
The brigade over here in Santa Lucía was great--super low-key, friendly, and eager to help. I took them on the sunrise hike (beautiful), answered as many of their questions as I could, and tried to calm some of their frustrations about their limited abilities to help in the short time they had. It was a great experience, in that I got to better understand how StoS looks from the "outside," or at least from a brigade member's perspective. The kids were super enthusiastic, and it was nice to have a couple fresh, friendly faces around the clinic. At the end of the week, I took them out to the airport, a long 9-hour bus ride that left my butt sore and my entire body covered with dust.
Besides the brigade, we also have a few extras floating/running around here. Dra. Rosbinda's family is here, which means we are often entertained by her hilarious husband and their three precious kids, who normally live in Tegucigalpa, the capital city several hours away. They are a handful, chasing/hitting/screaming at each other, but they are increeedibly adorable. The little ones are constantly tugging on me to play soccer or watch a movie ("Los Cuatros Fantásticos!"), while the oldest (naturally the most responsible) always says hello and waves when he sees me, sometimes trying to say a phrase in English. In particular, their precociousness and avid curiosity are in stark contrast with the kids who live/work around here, who tend to be more quiet and, sadly, are used to being left alone, so they ask very little of the people around them. We also have Treván, who is a third-year med student here for a clinical rotation, and it has been great getting to know her. She is always positive, reminds us of what we sometimes take for granted, and is phenomenal about going out and trying to become familiar with SL and its locals.
I've realized that it's way too easy to get comfortable here--we settle into our small slice of "American/upper-class" life complete with our internet, movies, and English... Sometimes I almost forget where we are. Besides the occasional venture into town for errands or--go figure--a Coke, I hardly ever interact with people outside of the clinic. It's easy to forget that we live in rural Honduras, out in the campo with campesinos who survive by going out into the fields at the crack of dawn, who often don't send their children to school for the mere fact that they can't afford the basic expenses of food and travel, much less actual costs of school like books and writing utensils.
But just as I began to get comfortable again this time around, something happened to jar me awake, reminding me that our microcosm of English and comforts is not at all representative of this poor, rural town. A few nights ago, Ashley, who'd been working in the clinic at the time, ran up to ask Ben about sending a patient on the ambulance. A woman had been carried into the clinic on a "bamboolancia," a mattress tied to a bamboo stick on either side, by 5 policemen from Santa Rita. She was in her mid-thirties, had a husband in the States, and two children at home. After a man had been continually harassing her, she reported him to the police, who told her nothing could be done. In retaliation for trying to report him, the man came back to her house, this time with a machete, and gashed her from head to toe. She had 5 cuts on her head alone, one of which caused a skull fracture and another that left her scalp practically hanging off. Another cut so deep into her hip that her bone marrow was visible. Two doctors spent a few hours just suturing as many wounds as they could before sending her off on the long road to the nearest hospital in La Esperanza (usually a 5-hour bus ride on rocky dirty roads; around 3 hours in our makeshift pickup-truck-turned-ambulance).
This patient touches on so many different aspects of life here... She reminds us of what people here are up against, and how people can be resigned to their situation, no matter how hard it is or how much it could be improved. What do you do when you can't depend on the authorities, who are supposed to enforce the law and protect you from harm? Or when you're used to hearing promises that are never kept? Or when the elected mayor is himself a violent drunkard who is known to engage in domestic violence? After what kind of abuse would women come together to fight back, or even just assert themselves in their own households? Under what circumstances would people come together in order to try again, to try to fight a battle they've lost again and again, or try to be heard when they've been ignored time and again?
Afterward, we heard rumors that the woman hadn't made it. And that the man who had done it had escaped to El Salvador, where he would be safe from the authorities because of extradition laws. My first gut reaction was to try to check it up--I'm so used to checking the news and Wikipedia that my fingers were practically already typing before I thought... Where would I find that information? There are no newspapers here, and we are so far from any city that their newspapers wouldn't even receive this information. We would have to get in touch with the hospital and hope that we spoke to someone familiar with this patient; was she even still there? How would her family members find out? There are no tragic headlines to be found anywhere; if they didn't try, it'd be very possible they wouldn't find out at all. Everything is via word-of-mouth; the distinction between truth and rumor becomes pretty blurred.
In the face of all this, it becomes incredibly easy to doubt what we're doing. I am looking to improve our girls' empowerment program, but in what way can we empower people who have little to aspire to, whose adult examples are primarily soft-spoken, submissive, and essentially expected to cook, clean, and produce offspring without ever wanting anything for themselves? More generally, how do we try to encourage development in a community that we are only beginning to understand, in which we will always be outsiders? Not only do we look, dress, and talk differently, but we come from a background and a mentality where people believe that each person has the ability to determine his/her future, to work hard for what he/she wants in hopes of attaining it, and continually strive for improvement. And in turn, we hope and even expect this from people here. We come in with the aim to "help," which naturally implies that we would know better. But... Well.
But.
