I’ve been unable to write a blog post lately. Making sense of life these days is difficult. Every time I think I know what I want to say, my assessment of what we are collectively experiencing changes and my assumptions get thrown out the window. So, I’ve decided to just write about things that come to mind. Maybe you can figure it out.
Weeks before our departure date of February 29, the leader of our eye care mission to El Salvador, an eye doctor who values collaboration, while doing advance planning with a few volunteers, mentioned this near the end of a long list of items.
“OK, Coronavirus. One of our volunteers brought it up in an e mail. Do you think there is anything we need to do in connection with that?”
I was quick to answer.
“What could we do? I mean what would we change now about the way we run the clinic that could make a difference? I think we’ll be home long before whatever happens with that has any effect on anything.”
“I agree. I just wanted to bring it up. It’s a concern for at least one of us.”
When we landed in the San Salvador airport all the staff were wearing protective face masks. When we left nine days later, we were afraid they would be taking our temperatures before allowing us on the plane back to Miami.
We operated a four-day clinic in the town of El Transito, a working-class community of 35,000 people forty-five minutes by bus from the large metropolitan center of San Miguel. El Transito served as a hub for people living in small villages around it.
The third day was the toughest. We worked late and served more people than we anticipated. It was hot. We worked in a concrete parking garage. We had a roof over our heads, but it was an open-air structure with no air conditioning. Temperatures topped 100 degrees in the afternoon. By the time we served our last patient we were worn out.
Though many of us wanted to simply go back to our hotel, our hosts, members of a good San Miguel rotary club, insisted we take a detour to a beach. As we slowly wound through hilly country roads the light began to fade. Some of us dozed off.
The bus stopped at a small resort. We got off the bus, all thirty-one of us, and were directed through a group of buildings towards a place where the sky opened. As we neared the beach, we could hear the waves.
When we reached the sand and began taking off our shoes the sun was nearly touching the horizon over the Pacific Ocean. We waded into the surf as the clouds, the sky below the clouds, the cresting waves, and the water washing around our legs turned orange. It was the perfect end to the day.
The resort staff put citronella candles on the sand between our tables and served us drinks and dinner under tents near the beach. The night sky turned black and the air around us cooled.
An eye doctor from Mexico City, refreshed and reflecting on what just occurred, asked this question.
“When you saw the sea for the first time, how did you feel?”
I responded right away. I’d thought about that very moment just an hour earlier, when I felt the waves rushing back towards the ocean pulling sand from under my bare feet.
“I was seventeen years old and the farthest away I’d ever been from the Illinois farm I grew up on was Fort Leonard Wood Missouri. The day after I graduated high school three of us farm kids drove to Florida without stopping in a Chevy Impala Super Sport. We drove straight to St. Pete’s Beach, changed into swimming suits in the car, and walked into the Gulf of Mexico. The ocean was the biggest thing I had ever seen. I thought my whole life was in front of me.”
“Yeah, OK.” She said slowly, not satisfied with my answer, “But how did you FEEL?”
I thought for just a moment and then I remembered.
“I felt free. I felt absolutely and totally free.”
I don’t feel that way now.
Thinking your whole life is ahead if you IS a feeling. And it's like the ocean ---you can't see the other side. You've been told how far it reaches, so you have to imagine the other shore.
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