The nurse says she watched them unloading all the trucks yesterday. The dusty (very dusty, how do you even capture scales?), covered trucks and all the boxes battered from travel but still intact and full of things logistical and the stacks of plastic buckets, cups and piles of nutritional supplements. And she felt very happy, proud, to be sitting on a porch in this village, a hard five days drive from the capital, and being part of it - this organization, this project, this reality - and watching all these practical things unloaded by sweating, and rope armed, and enthusiastic men. For whom we mean jobs, too.
Mariette says people are very happy. Very happy that we are here. It is not just those we hire who are being helped, but all the market ladies and the vendors, all the small storekeepers and the man who cuts the trees into planks and 2x4's, and the young men who have driven motorcycles and also the ladies who carry water from the pump to us several times a day. It is everyone, she says, and what she means is the Economy. Nothing about us giving healthcare or medicines or working in the hospital. Not that the people would not be grateful when children were saved. But what do people need? Economic buying power. Independence. The ability to prioritize and make their own choices. The expansion of limited resources, and the idea of what the future might hold.
One mother changed religion. Got religion, lost it. All at once. She had been part of a 'resistant' church. I do not know what this entails, of what beliefs the opinions are derived, to which God prayers are sent, or appeals for protection. Only that in this work it is called this way, "a pocket of resistance," and for reasons unclear it means the people of these churches will not vaccinate their children or themselves, though treatment of an illness is accepted. Not Scientologists, or those other edgy religions we think of in the US, who go so far as to question the medicalized premise of our times. And here, too, nobody really understands, or even takes a moment to ask the question of whether or not they might be right. Right? It is a thing already known. Everything couched in medicalese and a worldview just as biased as anyone's. "Resistant" only a label as seen from one perspective, but who would admit that? The trouble with vaccines the same as with dictatorship, regardless of beliefs in worth or value; herd immunity brooks no dispute. s
But here this mother came, a child nearly dying, and received the treatment and the child is better now. While she was there the staff - not ours - went on about the example she, the mama, (it is always 'she,' when it comes to this blaming) had set. She herself had not been vaccinated, nor her children, and both of them were ill with measles and the one nearly dead (or was this the mother where the one was already dead? The sibling stories abound. Have two, keep one...when lucky) and didn't that just go to show?
Well it didn't, really, statistically speaking. Not half of those sick children had been vaccinated, "resistant" parents or not, but for whatever reason the reasoning worked, and so the mama dropped her church and became a Catholic. Last week.
We wonder if you can become a Catholic just like that, just overnight? Catholicism, of all the religions, seems like something that would take more time, and suffering, to enter into.
But these are just a few of them.
The consequences to our presence that are not written into any plan, or exploration. Not part of objectives. Not part of analyses. That I, at least, get caught up in, thinking of.
And whether ever labelled as good or bad, they simply bear consideration. An objective of Do No Harm, above all else, and so you must ask the questions: what is harm? And its opposite? What does it mean to "Do?, in fact" And our responsibilities and their boundaries? What is it that we are doing, directly, and what is it that what we are doing is doing, behind the gates or fences, around the corners from what we see?
Who do we leave here when we go?
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