I arrived in Roatán this past Saturday and took a taxi to my apartment in West End. My room charged me an expensive $25/night, and was much too big for me, as there was a kitchen, a bathroom and two bedrooms (three beds for only myself). After living there for five days, I moved to a house owned by Peggy Stranges in Sandy Bay, where the area is not as filled with tourists and I can have more of an interaction with the community. Peggy Stranges is an Ohioan who has lived and worked here for the past five years, opening her own clinic in the area and serving the community through various other public health projects. She’s currently visiting family back in the States, and will be returning tomorrow. I look forward to meeting her, as I have heard very good things about her.
I met and worked with Dr. Charles (my supervisor and one of the doctors for the Roatan Hospital Pediatric Clinic) on Monday. He is a pleasant fellow, very easy to talk to and amiable. I have enjoyed the daily Spanish lessons I get from working with the patients here, and I'm sure Dr. Charles gets a good laugh at my attempts to communicate. From the past week I've seen my fair share of the sniffles, scabies, and all sorts of colds, coughs, and fevers. However, seeing those patients get better is the best part of my day, so it's easy to fight off the heat and mosquitoes in order to see that I'm making a difference in someone's life each day I wake up.
Each day I wake up at around 7, spending a couple minutes in the morning conversing with the locals. My Spanish is at best rudimentary (yay AP Spanish!), but hopefully the next few weeks will be better as I am learning more and more everyday. What surprised me most was how accommodating the Hondurans are, and even though my Spanish is poor they still smile and patiently work through my fragmented sentences. I also enjoy talking to the cab drivers that take me to work every morning and to the local restaurant workers that feed me whenever I don't feel like cooking. Anyway, I arrive at Coxen Hole at around 8, and for about the next four hours I triage patients, do inventories, give medicines, fill out paperwork, watch Dr. Charles in action. In the afternoons I plan to teach community volunteers on how to treat infant diarrhea and prevent diabetes, but I haven’t begun that work yet. Hopefully when Peggy arrives we can spend more time talking about the goals for these public help projects.
The other day I spent some time in the afternoon helping to carry logs to Peggy’s housekeeper’s home. The houses here are very substandard, built with wood from the local forests on dirt floors. It's sad to see the environmental damage done and their poor living conditions, but I know it takes more than one person to transform their way of life. Even so, I believe what I'm doing there is worthwhile, however futile it may seem.
However, I feel as though that paternalistic view is misleading; there are plenty of qualities about this island that I admire. Thursday I met a local boy named Kenfor, who visits Peggy’s house consistently. He is very much like an islander, communal and free-spirited, qualities that I feel are difficult to find back at home. I almost envy his life here, where there is little social or academic pressure, where days seem slow and life feels alive, and there are hardly the worries unique to the caffeine-addicted US. Even in such poverty Kenfor is just as happy (if not more) than the children back home.
One person that I especially appreciate is Jenn, keeping me company while I’m here. Unbeknowst to her, I am truly thankful for all that she’s done—assimilating to island culture would not have been as easy, and with my embryonic Spanish and sense of direction I most certainly would have been lost. She updates me on everything from clinic history to good restaurants to go to. I feel that she has been instrumental in keeping the program on track and also in making my stay here more enjoyable.
In the future I hope that I will be able to learn more about the culture here and talk to the locals more regularly. I feel that there is definitely a language barrier between me and patients, as although I can understand most of the information needed for triage, I have trouble understanding anything outside of medical terminology. I feel that there is also a phenotypic barrier; I look too much like a tourist (I doubt there are very many Chinese living in Roatan), so this contributes to the locals marking me as a foreigner. These will be difficult obstacles to overcome, but I am confident that in the next three months I will be able to learn how to interact with the Hondurans normally.
