There is something so right, welcoming, and warming about being met by a child’s smile. It is also seemingly so natural for a child to smile. I suppose it is because life is so fresh and wondrous for a child. Each new moment and new encounter is the opportunity of discovery and joy. It is promising, hopeful, a moment of trust, and a time of engagement. Perhaps as we grow older and experience disappointment and even betrayal, we lose the capacity to be fully engaged. But somehow a child’s smile touches anew upon our hopes and our dreams. But some children simply don’t smile. I’ve found them among those who are malnourished. Their willingness to trust, their openness to engage, has already been lost to life without joy. This is such a tragedy. If anyone should smile, it is a child.I am told by those who first encountered these two children on their first visit to begin the nutrition supplement “Chispuditos,” that they weren’t smiling. In fact they were distant, hidden, fading away from life. But on a future visit, when this photo was taken, they were in the forefront. How easy it is to restore hope, to inspire engagement! All things can be overcome when you can be engaged with your world, and a child knows this innately. How much good we can do for our world simply by investing in the birth of a smile.
We are fortunate this year that our nutritional program is up and running. It is funded until the end of this session. We have managed to bring some costs down and we have wed the nutrition program to our clean water program. We are helping to keep more children healthy and free from retarding, chronic diseases. Unfortunately, it will only last while we are able to fund it. We so greatly appreciate your assistance. If you can find us others, we can continue to make these smiles flourish.
Writers are dependent on muses who are often fickle and unreliable. Sometimes, after a medical mission trip, I suffer through the anxiety of not finding inspiration. On other occasions, I simply find myself too busy to dedicate the time to writing up an article. Both problems haunted me after the Brown/Wingate medical mission trip that recently took place in Guachipilincito. August presents as one of those months were the stars align in such a peculiar manner that everyone wants to be in Honduras. Another brigade followed on the heels of Brown/Wingate. The funder for our very extensive and ambitious nutrition program, Mathile Institute with its representative, Greg Rheinhart and his wife Becky, came to the Frontera to visit the families and children benefiting from the program. We are investing in a major expansion of our education program among area schools. And finally, the Board members of our organization came to Honduras for a meeting. With all of this happening at the same time, Laura and I were caught up in the whirlwind.
Dr. Emily Harrison and Moises Vallecillo, Brigade Coordinator
Meanwhile, I was feeling great anxiety over not publishing a blog on Brown/Wingate. Additionally, one brigade participant, David, a talented pre-med student, had extended his stay in Guachipilincito to complete additional service among the community. Laura and I had no time to look in on him, or to wish him happy birthday as it had passed during his time there. But this Wednesday, we were transporting yet another brigade from the Frontera back to the airport in Tegucigalpa. We stopped in Concepcion to pick David up along the way to bring him back to the airport as well. He had been in Guachipilincito over a month so we figured he had a lot of luggage. Our brigade coordinator, Moises, and I jumped from the bus figuring we would need to assist him with his baggage. What an amazing site! David walked towards us, a light backpack strapped to his back and a water bottle and hat in his hand. He looked as if he were going to the corner store, rather than taking an intercontinental journey. The sight of him froze me in my tracks, and I knew there was something of tremendous value in this visage upon which I would need to reflect.
“Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not have two tunics. And whatever house you enter, stay there, and from there depart. (Luke 9.1)” Fear not, I do not intend to preach, at least not in any religious sense, though I used to do that for a living. I might have just as easily said, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers (Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind).” David’s confidence, his willingness to shed the false security of things for a conviction in the goodness of relationship, is a witness of which I and the world have great need. Here I am running around for the past three weeks, investing in the complexities of negotiations and intense communications, carrying a ton of baggage both literally and figuratively, and this young man walks lightly and lithely among the humble people of Guachipilincito. Whose journey has more meaning? Who has touched upon the beauty of humanity? Who has witnessed the miracle of compassion and generosity?
Patient Consultation at Guachipilincito
David symbolizes the greatness of many of our brigade experience, and most especially that of Brown/Wingate. Our brigade groups arrive with loads of supplies at the Tegucigalpa airport, bins of medicines and supplies that make their way through customs and are packed into transport vehicles to journey into isolated territories where the people are resourced challenge. The groups have paid extra to move these items and it has cost them time and energy for planning and execution. We place great value on the things we tote, while we essentially ignore those who do the toting. But when these groups leave, they are unburdened, having used up or gifted the supplies. They are depleted, or seemingly so. Yet, I would contend that they are the ones who have been enriched as much if not more so than the ones who have benefitted from their service and generosity.
Nutrition Committee Meeting
Brown/Wingate saw hundreds of patients, gave away hundreds of dollars of medications, trekked across step winding paths to visit the elderly and infirmed confined to their distant homes, fulfilling their well-planned mission of compassionate service. They unburdened themselves with the absolute joy realized in generosity. Giving presents as an exercise in addition and subtraction; something taken away from one to the corresponding gain of another. In fact it is an exercise in multiplication where value expands exponentially. I wonder sometimes who benefits more from generous compassion, the one receiving or the one giving? Then again, even that is my need to judge and quantify as if even compassion becomes a measured competition. Perhaps it is only the matter of walking joyfully unburdened.
In the Pharmacy
Thank you David and thank you Brown/Wingate. Thank you Guachipilincito. All of you have given witness of the beauty of humanity. How enriched we are when we realize how little we need.
Laura and I do not depend on stocking up on food and household supplies in Concepción. There is a market on Saturdays in Concepción where we can find some of what we need. The items are always more expensive, and it is not always clear just how fresh the fruits and vegetables are. The pulperias (Mom and Pop supply stores) may, or may not have fruits and vegetables during the week, but they certainly don’t look very appetizing by Wednesday or Thursday. Other supplies’ availability is at best a crap shoot and the quality is questionable. It is just hard to get anything down to the Frontera. We’re simply too far away. On one occasion we were looking for a small chain and padlock to secure a cabinet where we store a laptop at the clinic. I imagine that on Family Fued, the survey answers to the question, “Items found at a hardware store,” would likely include a chain and a padlock. Still, at the two retail places purporting to be hardware stores, we couldn’t find either. We ended up getting them in La Esperanza, where we end up buying almost all of our supplies. Checking out Nutritional Information
Still, there is one thing here that is as ubiquitous as geckos. Snacks: sugar, salt, caffeine, synthetically contrived carbohydrates, and that orangey, sticky substance that stains your fingers and pretends to be cheese. Every pulperia stocks a plethora of these processed, plastic-packaged, brilliantly marketed, nutritionally challenged, faux food products. Coke, Pepsi, sports drinks, energy drinks, chips of every texture, flavor, and color, line the shelves. The evidence of their abundant presence is not confined to the pulperias. Their non-biodegradable containers litter roads, walkways, hills, and homes, even scattered along the pathways to the most remote villages. We have no landfills here, no recycling to speak off, and no understanding of how this stuff so completely debases life. It pollutes our bodies when it’s consumed, our land when it is discarded, our air when it is burned, and our community pride when it invades and conquers all viable development. It thrives here, much like weeds in an untended garden, and like weeds, chokes life and leeches the nutrients from the environment.
According to a Nielsen report, snack sales in Latin America ($30 billion) increased by 9% from 2013 to 2014 (http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/press-room/2014/global-snack-food-sales-reach-374-billion-annually.html, 9/30/2014). If obesity presents an epidemic crisis in the US, it’s right around the corner here. Diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic, debilitating diseases follow behind the wholesalers’ snack vans that seem to have no problem reaching the Frontera. We’re in the middle of a drought. Water is as precious as gold here, but carbonated beverages flow with ease. María Antoinette’s prescient remark echoes across the hills of Southern Intibucá, “Let them eat cake.” Minnesota Debunking the Snack Industry
Marti Kubik, PhD, RN, and Karin Larson, RN from the University of Minnesota, understand this incipient danger. They prepared their students, studying for their Masters in Nursing, to speak sensitively and authoritatively about it to the people they would meet in Santa Lucia on their recent brigade. They spoke at the elementary and high schools and at the clinics, arming their audience with knowledge. Knowledge is the only effective defense against the snack purveyors’ reliance on the lure of immediate, self-gratification: “It tastes good, and it curbs my hunger.” One student’s passion came from a personal empathy; having managed diabetes, this student spoke from the heart.
Laura and I met up with the brigade on Thursday. They were traveling to the small clinic in the village of Santa Teresa about an hour and a half’s winding drive along a typical mountain road. The schedule purported they would be giving a workshop to a small group of women in the pregnancy club. Upon arrival, however, the men and women present were clearly not anticipating the arrival of a child. It was the chronic disease club. Dr. Kubik took it in stride, reminding her students that flexibility is a necessary talent. Serendipitously, the students quickly readied themselves to present on the dangers of the snack culture. Dancing Our Way to Healthy Living
Their presentation was as exceptionally flawless as it was engaging, and certainly no one would have known that they had come expecting to present on an entirely different subject. They first recognized how packed the room was, and thus had the sensitivity to present in teams of pairs rather than en masse. This sense of sensitivity and respect set the tone. Then someone showed a coke bottle, asking the audience to guess at how many teaspoons of sugar it contained. “Two, three, maybe four.” A sixteen ounce bottle typically contains eleven teaspoons of sugar. “Ugh, that’s disgusting!” as the participant fills the bottle with sugar. How does it even dissolve? Then, someone else presents a stack of empty bags of chips. We call them churros here, an innocuous, innocent word that draws up an image of a cute, panda bear. Someone reads the nutritional information. The first thing to notice is that in this tiny little bag containing less than a handful of crunchy things, the packaging claims there are three servings. Three servings cost five lempira (about $.23). Ralph Nader would have a field day debating the lack of truth in advertising. Then, they read the ingredients: the unpronounceable chemical compounds with fats, sugars, and salt. Everyone is laughing at the expense of the producers of poison. The curtain has been drawn back and the wizard is seen for who he truly is.
After the debunking, the discussions move to self care. Exercises bring the group to their feet and we’re all dancing and laughing. Then, before we dismiss the chronic disease club, everyone gets an individual check-up with blood pressures read and lungs and hearts listened to. A couple of feet are checked as foot care is critical for diabetics. Dr. Kubik is examining one woman. She proudly professes how faithful she is to her hygiene. Dr. Kubik exclaims, “I’ve never seen such well cared for feet! I would like to take you to the United States and present you as a model patient to the patients I see there.” True enough, most people want to be healthy. Beautiful Feet
It’s unfortunate that the force of consumerism blinds its benefactors to basic human dignity. There are other voices, though. These are the voices that respect human dignity. Thank you Minnesota for making it down to the Frontera.
