Mercedes, our cooperadora de salud from Arroyo de Leche treats my site visits to her community like they are day-long play dates.  It’s great.  I take the 40-minute motorcycle ride up a mountain, past the patches where the road is so bad that I have to get off and walk on foot, over 4 bridges, and arrive on schedule ready to meet with HHI’s hypertension patients.  Mercedes is super relaxed, washing her hair, preparing lunch, or stacking the wood planks for the new room in the house.  She tells me we will have the meeting with the patients “ahorita,” in “a little while,” which means anything from 2 minutes to 4 hours, depending.

The last time I was in Arroyo de Leche, “ahorita” was in such a long while, that I was not actually able to meet with our patients (the sole purpose of my visit) before having to speed away on a motorcycle to escape the afternoon downpour that would have left me stranded, the roads too muddy to return home.  I left the task for Mercedes to do independently.

Luckily, I did not escape an enormous and scrumptious home-cooked Dominican lunch and after-meal coffee so super-saturated with sugar that there was a sweet sludge slicked onto the side of my tin mug.  “Just take a taste and let me know if you need a little more,” Mercedes tells me.  I take a sip and immediately develop a cavity.

When I tell her it is never necessary for her to go so far out of her way for me, she puts her knife down, looks at me with sincerity, and says “!Oye!  Angi, esto no es nada.”  “Come on!  Angi, this is nothing.”  Even though I know it is something.  I know that it costs at least 70 pesos in gas just to get down into town to buy groceries, that her husband no longer has a job, that she put the beans on the stove at 6:30 in the morning, and that she is using a better cut of meat.  I know.

Since Laura has been in the United States, blazing HHI trails stateside and taking a short “vacation,” I have somehow managed to become the pity of my landlord, my neighbors, and in this case, our cooperadores.  “You’ll waste away living alone like that!  Come over tomorrow at noon for lunch.”

It’s hard to say no to fried plantains, rice and beans, salad, and chicken criolla, but it’s also sometimes hard to correctly interpret a person’s situation and intention, the multiple layers of my inter-personal relationships, my responsibilities to my organization as a young professional working in the field, and my desires and curiosities as a young American woman living in a new culture.

When Laura and I would share meals with families in Villa Ascensión, we always bought all of the groceries plus more, ate little, and refused seconds.  There, the situation was such that feeding two extra mouths for even one meal was almost impossible.  The last time we ate at Arroyo de Leche, however, I bought a sack full of groceries for Mercedes, and she was so embarrassed and surprised, that I realized right away that I had offended her.

I could go on about all of the miscommunications, misinterpretations, and sometimes unfortunate and always hilarious (in retrospect) mishaps that I have endured during these past nine months.  I live in a bit of a paradox: working in partnership with underserved communities while acting as the supervisor of our cooperadores; befriending and relating to other young foreigners volunteering in the field while spending my working hours relating to local male doctors, public health officials and administrators, cooperadores, patients; and working to do what I consider the right thing while learning everyday that all things “right” are extremely complicated.  I’m determined to figure it out (ahorita, okay?)  For now, fried plantains, miscommunications, misinterpretations, and mishaps galore call my name.

-Angi

This entry was posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.