Getting ready

I'm all over the scorpion bite, I'm happy to say, but it was an unforgettable experience. Now taking the flashlight with me AND putting my shoes on when I go to the bathroom in the night. Never mind, the next thing will be something else I don't expect.

We are a little less than three weeks from the arrival of our General Medical Mission, and there's a lot of organizing and preparing on my plate before then. Today I drove over to San Rafael Cedros to talk with Iris Alas, our wonderful local organizer, about food for our hungry team. We met with Doñas Angela, Maria Elena and Mirtala, and I can tell that we will, once again, feast like kings and queens. They've cooked for delegations before and they know what to do to keep our stomachs calm and our hearts happy.

San Rafael Cedros is one of the prettiest Salvadoran towns I've seen - sparklingly clean, with freshly and brightly painted stores. I should have photos to post, but I keep forgetting - eventually some will show up. It's a small town with a lot of surrounding country communities, and it's a well-organized town that has had some great successes recently in combating crime and delinquency. It's going to be a joy to get to know San Rafael Cedros better.

A rougher night

Last night I woke up at about 11:30 - the music was still booming over from the disco next door, but I seem to have learned how to sleep through it - and walked down to the bathroom, which is outside in the patio. Sudden stabbing pain in my heel. There outside the bathroom door I had managed to step on an alacran - that's the name for the local scorpion - and it had stung me. I yelped and carried on enough to wake up Margaret Jane (Korla was out at a local festival) who sat down with me at the kitchen table while we checked out Donde No Hay Doctor (Where There Is No Doctor), the invaluable first aid / health education manual. Alacran venom varies a lot in strength, but it's rarely dangerous for adults. That was the good news, but on the other hand, the pain and swelling can last for weeks or months...

I was beginning to feel altogether strange. My mouth started buzzing, then fingers, arms and legs. Korla got back, and told us that a Salvadoran friend had said to cut off the stinger, soak it in alcohol, and apply that to the wound. We'd killed the alacran by then, so why not? Soaked the stinger in a bit of the very nice brandy my Christmas guests had left and bathed my heel. I stumbled off to bed and spent the next five hours in chills and sweating, staggering when I tried to walk, my skin buzzing with electricity. My body felt light, unfamiliar, unsettled. This had definitely been an alacran which, in spite of being only about 3 inches long, had plenty of strong venom.

Now, twelve hours later, the buzz is still with me, but is lessening. My heel doesn't hurt at all, which suggests that the brandy soak was a good idea. I will definitely be putting shoes on in the future when I head to the bathroom in the dark, and I'll probably carry a flashlight with me for a while. I'm just mostly grateful that the alacran got me, and not Kathy Garcia, who is about half my size and would have had an even worse time with the venom.

I'd like to settle down now for 24 hours of uneventful peace, quiet and recuperation with no wildlife attached.

One rough day

I put Kathy Garcia on the plane this morning after what has to have been just about her worst day ever in El Salvador. It began with digestive upset & stomach cramps, which left her drinking Gator-Aid and eating toast for the day. Then, when she was lying down in the afternoon, she heard a scrabbling, and looked up to see a couple of rats running along one of the ceiling beams. The usual furor ensued: Kathy yelped, the rats fled, we moved her into a different bedroom. This was a little discouraging for us, as we hadn't seen rats for months and were happily convinced that they'd gone to live elsewhere.

This would have been more than enough, but then at 8 PM our neighbor started up the disco music at top volume, playing until after midnight. Not unreasonable on a Friday night, and usually I would just curl up with year one of The West Wing, which Korla has kindly loaned me - but Kathy and I had to get up at 3 AM to get her to the plane on time. We each got perhaps two hours sleep, but luckily there's no one on the roads at 3 AM, and after dropping her off I dozed for a couple of hours in the airport parking lot, in a blissful quiet interrupted only by the squacking of the grackles that live there.

At about this time, Kathy should be reaching home in Oregon, very, very tired and very, very glad to see her husband and daughter and quiet bed. I hope tomorrow will be perfect enough to make up for Friday.

Working together

It's been great this week to have Kathy Garcia here in Suchitoto and to spend a week working together on our coming missions. Usually Kathy is about 5,000 miles (an extremely rough estimate) north in the much colder regions of Eugene, Oregon, while I'm down here in the sunshine. We connect by e-mail and cell phone all the time, but it's not the same as being in the same place.

Most of our week together has been focused on our coming mission in San Rafael Cedros, a beautiful small town about 50 minutes to the southeast of Suchitoto. Yesterday we visited the beautiful La Santisima Trinidad retreat house in Candelaria, where our groups will stay, and the national hospital in the district capital, Cojutepeque, where our eye surgery group will work in May. Today we checked in with Iris Alas, our local coordinator for San Rafael Cedros, looked again at the municipal kindergarten we'll be using for the clinics, and tried to figure out how to fit all the docs and patients and helpers and translators and chairs and tables and exam tables and eye-screening equipment into a pretty small space. It's going to work, mostly because Kathy is so great at organizing space and flow, Iris is clearly an expert at organizing people, and I've gotten some good experience in organizing the permits. We hope to be a very well-organized group!

A moment to remember

Last Sunday, the day after we heard the terrible news of the shootings in Arizona, I sat in Santa Lucia, waiting for the Noon Mass to begin. Two pews ahead of me was a family - a mother with a four year old boy and her mother, la abuela, holding a boy of perhaps a year and a half with Down's syndrome. A young man I've often seen in church - I think he may be part of the pastoral team for Santa Lucia - was sweeping the aisle, getting ready for Mass. When he came to their pew he looked, stopped, set down his broom, talked to la abuela - probably asking the little boy's name - and within a minute was playing with the child with the greatest delight. He sat and played with the little guy - who loved him right back - for about 10 minutes. The church may not have been so well swept for that Mass, but I don't for a minute doubt that Jesus Christ had just walked through in the loving person of that young man.

How good to set that loving act against the hatred and confusion that led to the Arizona shootings. May the love somehow be stronger.

From winter to summer

Margaret Jane flew in today from Newark, where it was decidedly winter (12 degrees when she got up very early this morning for her ride to the airport) to Suchitoto, where we're enjoying our own summer "cool" spell, with the thermometer topping out at, maybe, 90 degrees. It's lovely to have her back here, and we hope she'll finish thawing soon.

Our disco neighbor has been active lately, but we're now equipped with noise-blocking headgear, the kind worn by guys jackhammering cement. It helps!

Feliz Año

Happy Year! That's what everyone here is saying to each other. Sometimes "Nuevo" gets added, but mostly it doesn't. Here in Suchitoto we began 2011 with plenty of noise - from the mountain of firecrackers that were lit with a bang in the streets to the dance music pulsating from the disco next door - and everyone proceeded to enjoy the lovely long weekend. I've been enjoying getting to know Susan Masters, Korla's mother and a Lutheran pastor called to a deaf community in Minnesota. Susan goes home tomorrow, and we will settle back into the ordinary times of January for a while.

I looked for an image that might speak of my hopes for 2011, and found this photo of the altar mural in the church at El Paisnal, the church where Padre Rutilio Grande was buried after his assassination in 1977. He was the first of many Salvadoran priests, religious and catechists who were killed during the civil war, and his death turned Monseñor Romero into a prophet for justic. In this mural, Rutilio stands to the right and Monseñor Romero to the left, blessing a table filled with the good things of the Salvadoran earth - fruits and vegetables, tamales, tortillas, a jug with something good to drink - and around them stand the people they loved. The legend - taken from one of Rutilio Grande's sermons - says "una mesa comun para todos" - a shared table for everyone. May we come closer in 2011 to sharing the goods of the earth with everyone, with justice, and may we treat tenderly the earth that blesses us with such bounty.