Life here is raw and rugged

         Tim and I are almost four months into our service as Peace Corps Volunteers in Guyana. As we expected, we have been through some ups and downs along our service. We are so grateful to have been placed in Linden, our busy town with a fierce pride in its culture and history. Daily, we take joy in the company of our housemates and our little kitten Rasta, who is snuggled up on my lap as I write this post. We are slowly but surely finding how we can fit in at our work places and see much potential for development projects. However, we think of our friends and family at home every day with a twinge of sadness. We get especially nostalgic for the life we left in California when we hear news of both the monumental and inconsequential moments that our loved ones at home are experiencing without us. How we wished we could have been at Heather and Jeff’s wedding, for example (although they knew we were there in spirit). And when I hear about Stephan’s choir and improv performances, I especially miss being with my little brother as he continues to grow into an amazingly talented and handsome young man. On some days we think about all the things that await us back home; friends, family, law school and job prospects and wonder why we continue down this road in the Peace Corps. 

But on other days, we experience the most amazing things and realize that this is the only time in our life when we will have the chance to experience life in such a raw, rugged sense. Life in the U.S. is so orderly and regulated compared to life in a developing country. It is a comfort to know that our secure life is waiting back home for us but we needn’t be in a hurry to rush back to it when every day we get to take part in some miraculous moments in here Guyana. To give you a picture, let me share two of the most raw and rugged experiences that I have had in the last month or so: 

“No, Mom, I do not want to be a nurse,” I remember telling my mother when I was applying to Political Science programs for my undergrad study. “I respect you a lot for being in the health profession,” I said, “but blood and bodily fluids are really not my thing.” Well, it’s funny the way things work out. Here I am, with my Poli Sci degree, working in a health center. This does not mean that I am working as a nurse, but since I’ve been here I have witnessed an amazing birth and assisted with horrifying dental procedures. How my UCSD education qualified me for this is still a mystery to me. 

The Birth:

A young woman comes into the health center for a malaria test since she is not feeling well. She is obviously very pregnant, 8 months, she thinks. She mentions to me, and a Senior Nurse, that her stomach is paining her and she just passed blood when she urinated. The Senior Nurse sees this as a situation better handled at the nearby hospital and calls an ambulance and, in the meantime, gives her a quick examination to see if everything is alright. To our surprise, she is almost fully dilated. She won’t make it to the hospital. The baby is going to be born in our Health Center.

I watch as nurses hurry to get sterile equipment into our clinic room. They place a clean sheet on the examination table, help the mother up onto it, and place a steel basin between her legs. The nurses instruct the woman’s own mother to run across the street to purchase sanitary pads and 2 clean pairs of underwear as an emergency form of bandaging up the pregnant woman after delivery. She seems undaunted by the fact that she now has an audience; at least 4 nurses, two nurses in training, a dentist who is very pregnant and expecting her own first baby soon, and myself, the mysterious white girl. It all seems very surreal as the senior nurse tells the woman when to breathe and push, while the mother during this entire process makes little noise other than a grunt, maybe two. Within 7 minutes, with a loud sloshing sound and a rush of blood and fluid, a healthy baby girl slips into this world. I stand, awestruck.

Visits to the Dentist:

The dentist, Medex, HIV counselor/tester, Sara and I ride down the Demerara River in a speedboat to a small village about two hours away. As the boat passes houses and shacks nestled in the jungle we wave to people to let them know that the medical professionals are on their way to the Health Post. People who need medical attention clamber into canoes and paddle up the river to meet us. 

We set up in a Health Post with no running water or electricity. Sara is asked to record names and information for Medex and I do the same for the dentist. As people come into the small room where we have set up a folding chair, a basin of liquid disinfectant, syringes full of Lydocaine and a terrifying array of plier-type tools, I take down their names and ages. Our patients range in age from 7 to 70. The dentist asks them which tooth is hurting them and calls out the tooth number to me, “Chelsea, number 42. Chelsea, number 21.” As I write down these numbers, the dentist, without further explanation, sticks the patient with Lydocaine and sends them outside to wait for the anesthetic to take effect. 15 minutes later, the dentist calls his patient back in to yank the rotten teeth out with what look to me like pliers. With very little friendly bedside manner, the patients are given gauze and told to rinse with warm salt water the next day and sent on their way. 

In one instance, I am particularly surprised when the dentist calls out 5 different, consecutive tooth numbers to me, while looking into the mouth of a man in his forty-somethings. I know enough by now to realize that this man is about to have five of his upper front teeth extracted. When the dentist is doing his extractions I usually try not to look, unless the patient is a small child and is squirming, in which case I stand up and hold down the child’s flailing limbs, trying to be as soothing as I can while they suffer though the procedure. However, one point during the extraction with the 5-tooth-extraction-man, the dentist calls upon me to assist. “Chelsea,” he says, “can you glove up and hand me some gauze. I am having some trouble with this one.” What else can I do but what he says and shortly I find myself staring into a mouth full of bloody, gaping holes and into eyes full of excruciating pain. I proceed to hand the dentists tools, whose names I don’t know, and gauze to stop the bleeding, all the while thinking, WHAT AM I DONG HERE????

The dentist

But after I am able to wash my hands, and clear the images of blood and bodily fluids from my thoughts, I feel a sense of wonder that I know is rare and raw. I never would have crossed paths with these sorts of things in my ordinary life. These are the experiences that Peace Corps promised and I know will stick with me for the rest of my life. So, although daily I ask myself, “How did I get here and what the heck am I doing?” at the end of the day I am full of gratitude for the experiences I chance upon in this crazy Peace Corps adventure.