Today I think I did good. Fragile, baldy conjugated, mercury-spill good. Wednesday good. Dirty hair good. Full of flaws and sins and intestinal bacteria but holy, whole, healthy, here.
We prepared the patients fast today with the usual disturbances: Caesar, a mental retarded 26 year old who gestures wildly and only says "uh buba buba bub," and the second tuberculosis patient, nicely named Segundo, needing his weekly pills. I got to watch him take them which is an important part of the treatment plan! Go Public Heath/DOTS!
We gathered our things and walked to the first school we were vaccinating that day for Hepatitis B. There was only one 6th grade of twelve children who all began screaming as soon as we entered the room. And surprise! That Nigerian guy who was hitting on me on the bus a month or so ago was their teacher. He came up to me and began talking very low and quiet in English about how we should hang out. I busied myself filling syringes. He left the children alone in the room, weirdly, where they continued shrieking. We vaccinated 11, excepting one girl who was apparently in chemotherapy and had to wear a mask all the time.
Walk back to the center, grab the Puembo bus to its final stop, Mangaguantag. Its even more rural, dirt roads, chickens, no sewers or drains. We walk a kilometer or so to the school that is in an assembly that requires all the kids to sit on the blacktop in chairs and scream in unison. We grab the 6th graders from the mass and get them in the classroom. There's a lot of yelling and two kids cry but I also have some nice conversations with students about life in the States, what they study, how germs work, etc.
As we walked back to the Centro, we ran into Dina, the woman I met on my first day in Puembo. She was dressed in her usual tiny shirt and tights, but this time she had her taxi driver husband and two adorable kids with her. She invited me to her house to "suck on guavas" and I said yes. I'm a firm believer in affirming kindness and saying yes to things. Except when I'm mean or stay at home, of course. So we turned around and walked the three blocks to her house and climbed cement steps to the roof, covered in clotheslines and empty bottles and cinder blocks and guavas. A huge guava tree with thick green leaves and gnarly pods, growing from the lot below. Her four year old scrambled around on rebar picking guavas while her husband climbed the tree and dropped down guava after guava.
Its fun to eat a guava but its not very pleasant. You have to twist and smack the pod to open it and inside are overgrown peas covered in a thick white fuzz. Pop one in your mouth, fingers slimy, suck and gnaw for a minute or two. The fur slides off, slightly tangy, and you spit out the giant bean sprout that’s inside, brown and green. There are ten or twenty pips in each pod, and none have much flavor or texture. It is truly a fruit that became a foodstuff because people were looking for something to eat that would give them some sucrose and didn't taste nasty.
Dina fills a plastic bag with about 7 pounds of guavas and 15 or so lemons and limes that she got from somewhere. I decline politely, and then carry home my giant bag of sour fruit.
Back at the Centro, I give everybody guavas. The dentist, the doctor, and the woman who comes in every day to get her caesarian wound cleaned. Two for the Leci, two for Doña Marcy, as many as the little girls next-door can deal with. Marcy has to run out for a second and we watch her daughter Camilla, who sits on the floor of the pharmacy sucking on guavas.
We spend a while putting the medications that we received from Yaruqui into the cabinets, sucking on guavas. This extremely annoying family that I think are albinos and/or have some sort of mental problem come in with their creepily pale baby. They ask me "when I will start being a doctor." Uhh never? I do not give them guavas.
At four, I pack up my things and the Leci and the dentist give me a brown banana and approximately a quarter of a watermelon. I never get sick of how much fruit there is here, how fresh it is, how good it smells, how cheap it is. And today is a day of fruit, the fruits of Puembo. Especially after the mango fiasco, it’s nice to feel the solid, pliable heft of a fruit in my hand and not feel guilty.
With my melon rind thrown away, I see Don Segundo in the park, the tuberculosis patient from earlier. He's so old and polite. His nails remind me of tree roots, he always takes his pills with giant swallows of pink yoghurt that he drinks from a juice bottle.
He waves me down. I give him a guava and get on the bus.
