Staring poverty in the face…

by Global Ministries | published on Oct 10, 2014

The image will remain burned onto my retina for the rest of my life, a scar that never heals. I stared poverty right in the face and it leapt up like a ferocious Great Dane to knock me over with its powerful paws. This July I was working in a small clinic located in San Martin Sacatepéquez with a group from California. It was the second year I have worked with this group and the familiarity made the working part easier even while the situation came close to crushing my spirit. We worked with three villages during the 4 days I was at the clinic, San Martin Sacatepéquez itself, Nuevo Concepción, and San Jose Mas Allá. I want to tell you a short story of one experience during that week.

That 3rd day at the clinic we arrived at the usual time, 9am, and stepped off our shiny white chariot in front of the clinic. It almost seemed like we were walking between worlds, coming from our posh hotel in Xela and drifting through the villages, protected behind the thick glass windows of a luxury tour bus. We arrived at the clinic and people were lined up already to see the doctors, to get medicine, some having walked hours in bare feet, others crammed 90 to a regular school bus. Like I said, a different world. There was nothing to suggest that that day would be any different than the others, where we sifted patients as efficiently as possible through the machine that was the clinic. Registration, patient interview, vitals with the nurses, wait to see a doctor, see doctor, wait for prescription, get medicine, done. Each cog a vital organ in the machine and oiled to perfection more and more as each day of the clinic passed. Yet when I walked into the patient interview room that day and saw a young woman lying, legs bent, head back on a plastic sheet covering a mattress, I knew that that day would be different. The plastic sheet was a sickly yellow color that mirrored the pain in the young girls face. I looked quickly to one of the other volunteers who was standing over her. There was no need to ask the question for she immediately said that the woman had just had a miscarriage in the bathroom while waiting for us to show up.

My first thought was to find the doctor. I did. He said the young woman needed to be moved immediately. I scooped her up gently and carried her out of the interview room, through the front lobby, and back to the exam rooms. She couldn’t have weighed 100 pounds. Her black eyes bore a hole in me. I am certain that part of her fear was from what had just happened to her but I think that I contributed to her panic as well since a 6-foot tall, strange gringo was carrying her after a traumatic experience. I looked down at her as I carried her, trying to smile through my eyes to let her know that she was going to be all right. She opened her mouth as if to say something and I saw the mess of rotting teeth and empty spaces where no sound would emerge. I tried to guess her age, she looked 12 but she was malnourished and turned out to be 21. We had visited her village a few days before: a trek out into the mountains on a road with just two paved strips for the wheels of the bus. I had seen the poverty in which her village lives, listened to how families have to scrape together just enough to give their children a tortilla and some sugar water, seen how their distance from a doctor affects everyone. Yet it was her eyes that told the real story.

In many similar cases and faced with the poverty that I see on the streets or hear about every day, I can go numb and the feelings just wash over me so that I can take another step forward. This reaction is currently beyond my control, it just happens. It is just something that has emerged to move me through the days, a kind of defense system to make me almost immune. But in this case I was besieged on all sides by emotions, my defenses were useless, and the tidal wave swept me up in the moment. As I set her down softly on the examination table in the doctor’s room the tears sprang up the edges of my eyes. I looked down at her once more, the sides of my mouth curling slightly up in an attempt at a smile and then I walked out of the room, down the short corridor and back into the belly of the machine, shifting back into the numb personality, and getting the next patient into the system. There had been that one moment where my usually solid casing was cracked but I had quickly shorn up the breach, though the scar, as I said, will always be there.

In this work, you must learn to push through. People have asked me how I constantly, on a day-to-day basis, deal with this type of poverty and pain, and yet continue on. Many of these are people who come for a week, see the poverty and are weighed down by it. That suffering is my every day environment. I have learned to see it and yet see past it. As I said, this has become my defense mechanism. That young woman was helped that day, the doctor at the clinic saw her and the doctor determined that we didn’t have the tools to help her there so she was driven to a hospital. In a sense, the clinic provided here with a flicker of hope for the next day. She was just one of the over 250 patients who came through the clinic in 4 days. Though each individual looks small in the face of the larger issues (poverty, hunger, etc.), you can’t deny the surprising impact that just one moment of caring can bring. To close, I will say this: You can help the person in front of you at that one instant in time and that, in itself, can bring hope where despair could reign.

Pablo

Paul Pitcher is a missionary with the Christian Action of Guatemala (ACG). He serves as a communication and youth worker with ACG.