It’s all just apples and mangos

I have officially entered week 3 of my rotation. I am just beginning to feel comfortable in the community and familiar with the culture of Belize. I notice I communicate more easily with my patients and don’t feel as out of place when walking the streets of Punta Gorda. I went on mobile clinic this Monday and saw many of the same diagnoses as I had previously. I was quick to know the proper treatment (as well as what we had access to here in Belize). Today I even held a baby in a lepub while her mother received a birth control injection. I threw the towel with the sleeping 7 month old around my head and continued charting. It was definitely a highlight of my day. Hillside is an amazing organization largely due to its sustainability. There are charts for every patient we see in order to keep close follow up of their diseases, illnesses and management. Additionally, Hillside employs a lot of local people. This allows a familiar face to consistently interact with patients. The constant rotation of students and preceptors can lead to improper management, but having hired staff helps limit confusion and gaps in care. As I mentioned before, we do a lot of birth control injections (specifically depo provera). This intervention is an amazing option for the Belizean people! Spacing pregnancies always proper time for the mother to heal as well as take good care of her children. (Something that lacked greatly in Guatemala). Just having the option helps limit family sizes when the resources are low. The government is still working on encouraging native people to accept these medications, but slowly it is making a real impact. The hired staff is amazing at making sure the women follow up every 3 months for their injection. Plus, hiring Belizean’s empowers the community by suppling jobs within their own people. And as an added bonus, I get to form relationships with awesome people who make clinic even more fun to work in. On Wednesday, ironically the 4th of July, we had “cultural day”. Instead of going to the clinic, we toured local Mayan ruins and visited a women’s center. The Mayan ruins were explained to us by a very passionate tour guide. All of the Mayan people seem to be enthusiastic about their culture and heritage which makes it exciting to learn about. The women’s group showed us how to make sugar (please reference the picture of me struggling to pull a lever). The ladies take the sugar cane and grind it with a hand made tool. Each sugar cane takes a lot of power to grind and only produces a few ounces of liquid. From there, they boil the liquid to get a sap like syrup similar to honey. They use the syrup to sweeten all their products. The process takes a lot of hard work and diligence but the final product was delicious. We also learned how to weave baskets from palm like leaves. The ladies did it with little effort, but when we tried, we struggled greatly. It was NOT as easy as it looked. As we sat pealing and weaving, we talked with the women. We shared stories of where we were from and they giggled and awed at the concept of snow or the fruits we often ate. I told them I was amazed when I picked a mango straight off a tree and they laughed saying they couldn’t imagine the same thing with an apple. In fact, the idea of seeing an apple on a tree was the thought that amused them the most. Experiencing “cultural day” on my own country’s Independence Day brought so many thoughts full circle. It is amazing how we are all so different yet so similar at the same time. There is never a moment that I don’t remember my culture differentiates me from the people of Belize. I am careful to be respectful and considerate of every community I encounter. But underneath it all, I find we are all just people. Rudy, our van driver, is like my Mayan father. He fixed the laundry machine today and patted me on the back before leaving like a dad heading off to finish his work. Miss Amelia, our housekeeper, is like my mother. She scorns me to clean my laundry and do my dishes, but makes my bed when I forget and reminds me to eat on a busy day. Jamie, our handy-man, is like a life long friend. Just yesterday, he went swimming with us near a local waterfall where he would jump out from behind rocks to scare us as a playmate might. On mobile clinics, I sit with Clarita, our triage nurse, and gossip about boys and their cheating ways (we can both relate there). We have gotten so close in the past few weeks that she feels almost like my best friend or sister. I ask her about her daughter and she shows me pictures. She rests her head on my shoulder when she falls asleep on long rides. This is the thing about living in another country; slowly you become friends with strangers and those friends become like family. Only after weeks (and probably more so in months) do these feelings start to grow. The dirt streets feel like they lead to home and the people become neighbors. The line between feeling out of place and feeling entirely at home is one you can only experience by living in a new culture. I’m not sure I can explain it... but at some point you are aware you sprouted and grew differently than the people you are around, but you still share the same roots. After all, apple trees and mango trees look very different but at the end of the day they share the same soil.