February 2, 2015
My bias toward Wisconsonian culture is primarily based on the limiting view of crazed Green Bay Packers fans wearing cheese wedge slices as hats. Additionally, as a haughty, New England, right coaster, I lump Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota together. It’s really, really, really cold there, two or three days of summer in August at the most, and anyone purposely living under those conditions is very suspect. There aren’t any cities, everyone is a rural farmer, and the Lutheran Church forms everybody’s moral conscience. I blame the latter on NPR and Garrison Keillor. My bias of Wisconsin provincialism and narrow-mindedness was well-formed until just recently.
In January, Marcia LaSalle, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin native, arrived in Camasca, Intibucá, Honduras to begin four months of volunteer service at the Good Shepherd Bilingual School. Though her surname is French, her father is Puerto Rican. Her home life implied cultural diversity even as her mother, by Marcia’s own description, might have stepped right out of a Leave It To Beaver episode. Marcia visited Puerto Rico and her grandparents in Aguadilla, PR as a child and is close to many family members on her father’s side. Thus, she was acquainted with Spanish, but her father chose not to speak Spanish in the home. Marcia is very proud of her Latina heritage and wished she had learned more Spanish as a child. As a 21 year old adult, she is now becoming fluent in Spanish, having lived and traveled in Spain and now in Honduras. Not at all fearful or timid, seeking to expand her experiential horizon, she studied in England. The Wisconsin world traveler decided to spend the next four months in Honduras after completing the majority of her course requirements at St. Norbert’s College a semester early. When she returns in May she will have her BA in Anthropology.
Apart from that liberal, cosmopolitan, adventure-seeking, Wisconsin spirit, what brought Marcia to Honduras? A childhood friend spent some time here in Honduras with Shoulder to Shoulder. Whereas that had to have been influential, it’s perhaps best understood as presenting her the door to opportunity. Choosing to open that door was not in order to follow her friend, but to sate her own spiritual quest. Marcia witnesses an inner drive to meet and know others outside her own comfort zone. It is no surprise that she majored in anthropology. She admits to a fascination with culture. How is it that we can be so different, and yet so the same, and why? Most of us are content to be with others who act, think, and feel in similar ways. There’s a safety in sameness. But Marcia discovered that the best way to be pulled and challenged, to be self-reflective and to grow, is to feel just a little insecure around persons unlike oneself.
Marcia is at our bilingual school. Though she makes no claims on either being, or wanting to be, a teacher, she is present and sharing with the children. She’s teaching them English as they are helping her to hone her Spanish. They are communicating. More importantly, they are reaching out across culture, respecting that which is different and celebrating that which is the same. As a true anthropologist, Marcia is learning and teaching what is most important, even beautiful, about being human. Thanks Marcia. I will never again think of a Wisconsin with such limiting, narrow bias.
Perhaps you, even as you’re reading this, feel a certain tug to place yourself outside of your comfort zone. Maybe you would like to live in a developing country, serve and be served by the persons you would meet. Perhaps you have a little knowledge of Spanish, or a lot, or you just want the challenge of it all. If this describes you, maybe you should consider volunteering. Give it some serious thought. You can start by looking at the possibilities with Shoulder to Shoulder at https://www.shouldertoshoulder.org/volunteer-opportunities.
Dentists and Dinosaurs
January 29, 2015
I can fairly well remember my first experience as a child visiting the dentist. Like the experience for most kids, mine held the potential to be a traumatizing event. He was an older, unfamiliar man who seemed way too anxious about becoming my friend. He placed me in this strange, inclining, mechanical chair with straps on it. How could a little kid think of anything other than Frankenstein? Then this man I didn’t know who smiled at me way too widely, who now wore a bizarre green gown and a surgical mask, shown a tremendously bright light into my eyes, pried open my mouth and squinted oddly to peer profoundly into my oral cavity. His peering had obviously not satisfied his curiosity because he continued to poke and prod in and out of every crevice with sharp metal instruments, relics of torturing tools from the Inquisition. If anyone ever wished to publish a manual on how to traumatize a kid, they would simply accurately describe a first visit to a dentist. Yet, I wasn’t traumatized. In fact, I don’t even remember any of the business end of the visit to the dentist. Still, I do remember it. What did I remember? Why wasn’t I traumatized?
Dinosaurs. After the exam and perhaps a quick brushing (I didn’t have any cavities and thus was spared the true horror of a whizzing drill), the dentist lead me, my mother in tow, to a small supply room. There, displayed on a counter at about my eye level, were herding, plastic (actually probably rubber since it was the 60’s), green, red, blue, and yellow dinosaurs. They were only about one and a half inches tall, but they were mesmerizing. Then the dentist said a truly magic word. “Pick one.” Whatever maniacal experiment this deranged man had performed on me had been worth it, because I had hit the mother lode of prizes, my own dinosaur. Though I should have been traumatized by such a foreign, terrifying event, I wasn’t. The principal part of the visit, picking out my personal dinosaur, far overshadowed the otherwise haunting, intrusive nature of having someone stare into your mouth.
I remembered the dinosaurs, and the brilliance of my first dentist, just yesterday in a most unlikely, and yet again, foreign environment. We followed the dental brigade to the small village of El Cerrón. Though it is still vacation until February 2, the kids from the village met them at the small schoolhouse. The school is already enrolled in Shoulder to Shoulder’s school dental program. Most of them know the importance of brushing and the dangers of gluttonous consumption of sweets and junk food. They also get fluoride treatments and trips to the dental clinic when they need work. Even so, here in Honduras where dental disease from poor dental hygiene is an epidemic, the message can’t be repeated often enough. In any case, the boys all had rings on their fingers; little plastic rings that I assumed were gifts from the dental brigade. Then I noticed one boy playing with another boy, poking his ring at the other boy’s ring. I focused to see the two plastic, ring dinosaurs engaged in mortal combat. I laughed audibly. Though you may think otherwise, things have not changed that much in forty-five years. Closer scrutiny made me realize that some of the rings featured dolphins as well, and the girls had stick-on jewelry proudly attached to their bodies. When it came time for the kids to line up for their exam, when these very tall, very foreign people with bright flashlights wanted to poke around inside their mouths, the children showed no hesitancy, but rather raced to be first in line.
It really is easy to help others. It really is easy to communicate healthy habits to others. It really is easy to reach out across culture divides, to overcome the fear derived by the response to what is foreign by celebrating the joy discovered in what is shared. We do great things here at Shoulder to Shoulder, miraculous things, tear-jerking heroic things. Our brigades come down because they want to be part of it, and they are. They do miraculous things. We are proud of our and their achievements as we should be. Still it is sometimes the littlest things we do, the things most people wouldn’t notice or remember, that are the most powerful. Someone thought enough to bring dinosaurs, dolphins, and stick-on costume jewelry. Maybe even they didn’t think it would be that important, given all the heroic acts they would be involved in. But forty-five years from now, one of those kids from the small schoolhouse in El Cerrón might remember the magic of a dinosaur. Truly miraculous!!
Taking Interest
January 24, 2015
From what I heard, Buffalo, NY had about a thousand feet of snow this year. I would assume the nine graduate students and one professor from the University of Buffalo, School of Pharmacology experienced quite a shock last Monday when they arrived here in Honduras. They certainly did pick the best time of the year to come. They ended up at Shoulder to Shoulder’s clinic in Santa Lucia, one of the hottest, driest, and lowest spots in all of Honduras. The climate must have been a great shock, though perhaps a welcome one, to their bodies. The culture shock must have been pretty intense as well. They took two days to get to Santa Lucia from Tegucigalpa. They spent Monday night in a nice hotel in Siguatepeque about an hour and a half outside Tegucigalpa. The next day, however, was about five and one half hours over and down the mountains, four of which they traveled on the treacherous dirt roads, washed out and eroding. They arrived to be confronted with trickle showers, low power electricity, spotty and slow internet, the new ways of a new people, and everyone speaking Spanish.
Shoulder to Shoulder is excited to have the University of Buffalo here for the first time. The pharmacology school offers a unique brigade experience. They offered workshops with various groups like the pregnancy club in Magdalena where Laura and I met up with them. They were able to offer insight to the women relative to what medicines can and can’t be taken during pregnancy, how pharmacology works in health in general, preventative care strategies, etc. The doctors and nurses at the various clinics and health centers were impressed and pleased with the brigade work. The doctors and nurses, and even the health promoters, are so often overwhelmed dealing with large volumes of patients and emergencies that they don’t find the time for teaching prevention and home health care. The work Buffalo did was tremendously valuable and greatly appreciated.
The students were thoroughly enjoying their cross-cultural, service experience. None of them spoke Spanish, though the interpreters were excellent. Many had been to foreign or developing countries in the past. Their leader student, Ciera, had been twice to the Dominican Republic on service trips. She hopes that this early commitment from Buffalo will be a long and meaningful one for the school. We hope so too. Speaking with one of the participants about how he was experiencing the culture and the people, he paused and thoughtfully reflected. He shared that so much of person’s lives in the US are consumed with the acquiring of things. Here people are much more present to other people. People really take sincere interest in one another, and things are just not so important.
We are certainly taking interest in you, Buffalo. You have so much to offer. We thank you for your generous, unselfish response. We will be looking forward to your return. Hopefully it will again be in January so you can all get away from the snow, ice, and cold.
