A winter cold in paradise. From my journal 2-24

This cold has been persistently annoying in more ways than one. It is bad enough to be constantly blowing my nose and struggling to breath at full capacity. The thing that is bothering me the most is having to fend off the women telling me I should take some medicine or go to the doctor, and the men in the field telling me I should take a break and go home. It is a pretty wicked cold, but it is nothing time and water won´t take care of.



It is particularly jarring to know that so many actual medical problems go untreated. There are people limping around their entire life and here I am all but being forced to the doctor.



I was thinking about how my $50 dollar donation helped one woman have a healthy child. How many people walking around and struggling with serious problems were at one point $50 dollars (or less) away from a crucial treatment?



I´ve never in my life seen so many cross eyed people or people with severe limps or badly healed broken bones. There are quite a few mentally ill people around too. Whenever I ask, ¨what illness does he have?¨or ¨What happened to her?¨I am met with the same simple answers, ¨She´s crazy¨or ¨He has a problem with his leg.¨



Why such simple answers? It´s not because they don´t care to tell me. It´s because nobody really knows. If they´ve never been to a doctor or recieved help, then how would they know?



This is in sharp contrast to Wisconsin where everyone knows that ¨She had a slipped disk between the 5th and 6th vertebrae. It was a 5 hour surgery and took 2 years of physical therapy for her to be normal.¨(I apologize for medical inaccuracy or impossibility in this example.) or ¨he has essential tremors and he really likes to talk about it. Ask him!¨



The idea that glasses, dental treatment, and a regular physician could literally change the face of this village is frustrating. As of right now there is a 2 or 3 day a week (not sure) dental clinic set up with frunds from the Los Toros Foundation, which is run by a group of people from a catholic parish in Grafton, WI and another group of Dominicans. This dental clinic is still very much finding its feet, and I´ve been told it isn´t very popular. Hopefully it will pick up speed, yet for an astounding number of toothless, or nearly toothless people, it is far too late.



And as for all the others, how many of the cross-eyed or lazy-eyed people could have gotten some help early on and turned out to be drivers, technicians, mechanics, electricians, or talented painters? Besides, what about all of the beautiful and simple scenes in their lives that have gone by unseen or distorted by their gaze? (I don´t know exactly what they can and can´t see or how it looks, but I´m sure it can´t beat normal vision.)



One of the crazy people lived just behind me, and I´ve mentioned him before. His name is Polibio and he looks to be in his 50´s. Everyone neglected to inform me of his condition and on my second day I spent a few minutes trying to have a conversation with him. Only when I noticed that he was looking through me did I realize he hadn´t heard a word. Now that I know, it´s impossible to ignore him, or avoid thinking about him. He lives in a shack all by himself, and spends the day wandering about talking to himself in low tones, and sometimes he pulls out a desk and writes furiously on old pieces of paper, loudly reciting numbers. I secretly believe he is actually a genius discovering something brilliant, but for the day to day, he is crazy until proven intelligent. I was first told that he went crazy when his family left with his wife´s lover for Spain, though this has since been corrected. His family left after he fell into insanity. At what point, if at all, did he see a doctor or a counselor? I´ll never know the monetary difference between the crazy guy I see now and the father and husband that was. (I am so interested in him that I am writing a story loosely based on Polibio. It is especially chilling to write about him when he is standing near to me, pointing at some far off place in the sky and talking loudly, as if it is an answer to an earth shattering question or riddle, the key to discovering the fountain of youth, Cortez´s gold, or the meaning of life. As they say here, ¨eso es heavy!¨(This is heavy or deep.))



I don´t know enough about microfinancing to go out and say that it could work wonders here, but I do think it´s worth a shot. There aren´t banks here in the village, and if there were, would they give out loans like the one´s needed in these situations? If you want to be technical, there are about 50 banks here. However, this is a misnomer and a poor place to put your money. These banks are where you enter the national lottery and nothing more.



I´ve heard that in some places in the developing world, micro-lenders experience wonderful pay back rates on loans to poorer people. I can´t remember his name, but a recent nobel proze winner was a micro-lending pioneer from India I believe.



What kind of good could that do here? There is only one way to find out. (I am not running an experiment, yet I am involved in a bit of it, mostly involuntarily, and it is not going well. It´s an experience that I may blog about in the future.)



Sometime later on I will be going to the clinic here in the village, to get an idea of what options people have, how much it costs, and when it was started, not to get my cold checked out.



(I was right. My cold is gone! This post is a few days old...)