For the last month and a half , the volunteers have been going to the Plaza San Sebastian, a plaza that most people avoid, because it is where the glue sniffers live. Somewhere around 30 people, ranging from early teens to early 30s, I would guess, live in this square in Cochabamba, Bolivia, continuously holding a bottle of glue to their noses, occasionally washing car windows to earn money to buy food and alcohol. The reason that the oldest people there are in their late 20s or early 30s isn't that they manage to escape the life by then; it´s that you don't have a very long lifespan in the plaza.
So, once a week, the volunteers have been going to the plaza to bring food, clean wounds, and try to build relationships with the people living there. I don't make it every week, but I did this last Friday.
There are always fresh wounds to treat when we go to San Sebastian. Most of the people who live there have obvious knife scars on their faces, mostly inflicted by each other. Many of them have horizontal scars covering their forearms, almost certainly self-inflicted. We're pretty sure that two of the girls, in their early teens, are pregnant, and there are some small children, age 2 and under, living with their parents in the square. I can only imagine the kind of brain damage glue does to a fetus.
When we went this last week, a young man limped up to us, assisted by another kid. One of the girls started explaining that he had pus in his leg, and that a doctor had taken it out previously using a syringe. When we rolled up his pants leg we saw that his left thigh was horribly swollen. We kept asking questions, and they told us that he'd been in the public hospital for a month in the infectology ward and that he´d just come back earlier that week. The street kids asked us to take out a syringe and drain the pus, like the doctors had before. I wasn't sure that was a good idea. If they hadn't fixed it after a month in the hospital, it didn't seem like something we could do much about, and I was afraid that doing anything might make it worse, introducing even more infection.
I consulted with Faith and Amanda, the volunteers with the most medical experience, and they agreed with me. Even if we didn't make the infection itself worse, he could still lose his leg or even his life simply by not getting further treatment. What he needed was to go back to the hospital. I knelt by the young man and explained to him that he needed to go to the hospital, that we couldn't fix the problem and might make it worse. ¨No, I don´t want to go to the hospital,¨ he told me, his words slurred by the glue and alcohol.
I tried again to explain, telling him, ¨If you don't go to the hospital, you might lose your leg, and you might even die.¨ He wouldn't go. As we discussed what to do next, he staggered to his feet and hobbled away. When I approached him again later, he immediately started repeating, ¨I won't go to the hospital, I won't go to the hospital.¨ There was nothing more we could do.
Since he wouldn't let us help him, we moved on to other patients. The nurses and interns who came along focused on cleaning wounds, while the rest of the volunteers and I talked with the others. One man approached us and introduced himself as Wilians. I started asking Wilians about his family. He told me that his mother had died in 2004 and that he had 7 younger brothers and sisters living in orphanages. I asked about his father, and he said that his father was a drunk. He started telling me what he believed about God, that God watches over us, and that everything happens for a reason.
I agreed with him, and then, in a moment of courage, I told him, ¨Yes, and God wants something better for you. He doesn't want you to be living in this plaza. He doesn't want you to be sniffing this glue,¨ I said, tapping the bottle he held in his hand. ¨It's damaging your body and your soul.¨ To my surprise, he threw his bottle of glue on the ground.
We kept talking, and I asked him if I could pray for him. I put my hand on his shoulder and we bowed our heads as I asked God to protect Wilians and to help him to leave his life in the plaza, to start to live the life that God had planned for him. When we finished, Wilians asked me to continue to pray for him, and to pray for his brothers and sisters. I promised I would pray for them.
¨You have the same heart as my mother,¨ he told me. ¨You will always be in my heart, like a mother.¨ I promised him I´d come back soon.
I don´t know what Wilians did when I left the plaza. He may have picked the glue bottle back up as soon as my back was turned. Even if he held out longer, I suspect that he didn't last long. But perhaps it was a start. Many of those who live in the plaza are there by choice, preferring to forget reality rather than to face it. I'm praying that Wilians will choose to face reality, in all its ugliness, and begin to make something beautiful.
As we rode back to the hospital in the ambulance, returning from doing checkups in the community where our paramedics are stationed, I got a call on my cell phone. It was Jose, the paramedic we'd left back at the post, while Pablo drove us home. "We need the ambulance now," he told me. I told Pablo to stop the ambulance, and we all, with the exception of two EMTs who were with us, piled out. The ambulance turned around, sirens blaring, and we took a taxi back to the hospital.
I traveled back to the States for a quick visit to family and friends in November. I came back [to Bolivia] three days before a group of PA students arrived. They wanted to get out of the city and do a bit more rural work, so we took them to the town of Entre Rios, in the Chapare (the jungle region of Cochabamba, where mosquitoes swarm and coca grows). Our driver forgot to tell me before leaving that his bus was in bad repair, so our 4-5 hour trip ended up taking 12 hours, but we got there. We treated around 50 patients in one morning but had to cancel our clinic for the second day, since we knew the return trip would probably take just as long. On the way back, at least, we got to stop at Parque Machia, a refuge for monkeys that had been taken from the forest and raised as pets.
We had a pretty laid-back New Year’s Eve. We had dinner with the paramedics and a former intern (Juan), and then we tried to keep our eyes open till midnight, when we shot off the fireworks that we didn’t get to set off at Christmas. A couple of the volunteers went with the paramedics, in case of accidents, since there are often a lot on New Year’s. They just went out on one call, but it was a bad one. A car went over a cliff in the mountains west of the city and fell about 90 feet. Surprisingly, only one of the passengers died. Two of the others had minor cuts and bruises, and the other had to be carefully lifted out of the car and then pulled up the cliff on a stretcher. She’s in our hospital now and will probably have surgery in the morning, but she should be okay. [Pictured is Leta, far right, with some volunteers from this month]
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