Machismo and Me

I was out the other night with a group of dental students at a local bar. My Spanish remains spotty and add loud rock music to the background with everybody else being Guatemalan and I was understanding close to nothing. I was greatful when the boyfriend of one of the dental students started speaking to me in slow Spanish and English. We talked for awhile about his life. He´d spent some time in the US, studied engineering, been with his girlfriend for five years. Then he tells me that since I´ll be here for awhile, he´ll let me in on a few Guatemalan secrets.

¨It´s like this,¨ he says, ¨when your woman is starting to get pushy, saying things like ´take out the garbage, go out and buy milk, ´you say, ´okay honey, but pórtate bien,´¨ which is the equivalent of ¨behave yourself,¨ or ¨be good. ¨ Then you give her a little tug by the hair at the nape of her neck (he demonstrated the correct form on his girlfriend). To this I thought, oh, if that´s how it´s done, I definitely have a lot to learn. At the time, I thought he was making a joke along the lines of the jokes that get told around the Thanksgiving dinner table in my family. I was later informed that he was actually completely serious and felt that he was truly imparting valuable information and life skills unto a an unlightened foreigner.

Machismo is definitely prevalent down here and comes up at least once every day in clinic. Women can´t get jobs, can´t leave the house, get abused, get sexually harrassed, all stemming from Machismo. When I ask people where this comes from, the most common answer is ¨who knows.¨ I´ll currently searching for a book that could give me some insight.

When I shared the story of the machista in the bar with one of the women from the US that live in my house, she turned to her boyfriend and informed him that if he ever tried the hair tug move she´d fucking beat him to death. And the cultural exchange continues.

Clinic Days

I´ve just finished my second week working in the clinic at Common Hope. I came in at 8am the first day last week, after two weeks of orientation to the rest of the project, expecting to have a few days of shadowing, further clinic orientation, and general advice on their approach to patient care. By 815 I was seeing my own patients.

It´s actually been going much better than I had expected. While I still find myself floundering at times with Spanish in the outside world, in clinic more often than not I understand what my patients are saying and am able (or at least think I am able to) make myself understood. The chief complaints run the gamut of primary care (my god, the guy using the computer next to me has been browsing pictures of women´s feet for the last 30 minutes) from endless coughs and sore throats to end stage colon cancer. The challenge is very similar to what I´ve seen in the states in that you have people who have so many stressors in their lives that it´s difficult to differentiate organic pathology from the psychosomatic. A patient comes in and tells me they have headaches, nausea, back pain, their legs hurt (but only in the front), they´re losing weight, and they want me to inject them with the contents of the two bottles that ¨some person¨told them would help them. One bottle contained intravenous B12 supplements and the other liquified liver.

The doctors who work in the clinic are incredibly helpful and take the time to explain things to me and give their opinions when I´m completely lost regarding how to manage a patient (which doesn´t happen infrequently). There´s still a steep learning curve in front of me and it still feels weird to walk around in a white coat and be addressed as doctor. The other day the doctors weren´t in the clinic and I asked the receptionist what we were going to do since we didn´t have any doctors that morning. She reminded me that I was there and that I should go stand in front of the bathroom mirror and repeat to myself ¨soy medico, soy medico, soy medico.¨ I´ve now incorporated this into my morning routine. Still not convinced it´s working.

But morale remains middling and tomorrow I begin anew. Onwards and upwards.

Kites and Dia de Los Muertos

Yesterday was The Day of the Dead I went to a town called Sumpango to watch their annual kite festival. The idea is that every year, for this day only, the spirits of dead family members descend from the heavens and commune with the living. Families go the the cemetery bringing flowers and other things to decorate the gravesites of the deceased and eat their lunch sitting close by in order to have a meal with the departed. Another part of the tradition is kite flying which is a way of creating a closer connection with the spirits in the sky.

It was an incredible site seeing kites fifty feet tall or more intricately decorated with a specific ultralight paper and propped up side by side (these ones aren´t for flying). Another part of the festival is a competition to see which team can keep their kite airborne the longest. The flying kites are smaller than the others but still are 10-15 feet in diameter. Tracks are formed through the crowd to allow the team members to run, pulling the rope attached to their kite behind them in an attempt to get them up in the air. A number I saw were successful, one staying up for several minutes. What´s interesting is that as the teams continue to pull the rope, the kite begins drifting over the crowd and a few actually starting coming down on us. At this point everybody scatters to make way and being applauding when the kite lands without crushing anybody. I kept thinking that in the states we´d probably be watching from behind a fence 100 yards away. This way is definitely more interesting.