A Good Start to a Good Year

The New Year is here! The New Decade is here! We think about resolutions, we think about change. We think about sacrifices that need to be made so that we can make this would a better place. Yeah sounds like an optimistic Peace Corps Volunteer talking. I just finished two weeks of invigorating work with some medical students from the University of Southern Maine. I was translating Spanish to English and English to Spanish for the humble farming families in the rural mountain region of Puerto Plata. It was like being back in college, but only moved from the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts to the isolated villages on a Caribbean island where cars don’t easily travel. Churches and small two room school houses were turned into general health clinics. Pews and extra small desks became the seats for 90 year old great-great grand mothers, pregnant teenagers and dedicated tobacco farmers. Their stories each unique, health issues fairly common, and smiles certainly penetrating.

I remember the 50 year old cock fighter, Pedro Martinez, from Arroyo Ancho. He walked into the clinic with a golden tooth smile after having finished cultivating acres of land, picking the soil so that he could plant corn and plantains when the rain came again. As Kaley and John, the Southern Maine medical students, checked his heart, lungs, and general health we discovered he was a strong man with few needs… until he told his story. Ten years ago he was riding back of a pick up truck when it hit a deep rut on an eroded road and flipped on its side throwing him off the back and the truck landing on his left leg. He had worked though pain for the last decade, though from the content expressions of his shinning smile and great laugh you would have never thought any such incident had occurred. This is how many of the many rural campo patients were. They came looking for help; we had a few pain killers, some special exercises or posture advice, but really I think we were there to share a cultural experience and some smiles that could themselves probably cure all ills.

This same medical mission returns every six months to these rural communities to check in on these patients. They are a demographic that does not receive many funds from the federal government, even though their needs for a basic health clinic would not be of great cost. One community we arrived at after two hours on foot because not even the 4x4 trucks could traverse the mud and steep slopes. That was a day to remember. The mayor of the community even hiked us out of the site 2 hours in his dress shoes and nice slacks, only to turn around and head back home 2 hours.

So not only did I enjoy the individual histories of these sturdy Dominicans, but the fellow Americans from Maine were pretty awesome people themselves. Their open hearts and desire to put together this trip on funds they raised themselves while studying and working made for a special exchange. I’m back in my site refreshed with hope for this new year, for this new decade.

Find time to volunteer within your job or your studies. Everyone benefits as a result.

Peace,
Jared