Continued Processing - Genetics

I live with superheroes.

Sure there are no buildings to leap in a single bound, no bullets to catch in your teeth, but I know.  I know I live with superheroes.  Wounds heal with a startling alacrity.  I've been put to shame in physical strength by 75-year-old men.  Having never touched a toothbrush, there are folks with straight, shiny teeth.  No need for expensive hair products when you already have straight, thick hair that will never recede, never turn gray.  You get the idea.

The young children seem to be the only ones that show infected bug bites like myself.  But by the time they are a few years old, they're good to go.  At this point in service, I've basically opened up Clinica Calante for the children's machete cuts or abrasions from hiking miles carrying firewood through the forest barefoot.  Every time, I am completely amazed by how little attention they really need.  So many times I say, "You should really get stitches for this," and two days later that laceration is closed.

Sometimes I'm frustrated by my surroundings.  My community suffers from an inexcusable infant mortality rate.  I try to help as a health worker, as a fellow human being.  But I also know that there is something larger going on.  As much as it saddens me to admit it, this is exactly why they are superheroes.  Only the strongest survive.  Generation after generation the gene pool remains pretty much like it always was.  Everyone has good vision, able to talk walks into the monte without a flashlight.  Sometimes I feel plain silly with my band-aids and ointments and sunscreen and and and...

Even Superman has his Kryptonite.  Unfortunately, the youth are starting to suffer from rotting teeth.  Sodas and candies are filling the tiendas.  I guess Kryptonite is a good analogy, a material coming from a world away, but from Superman's birthplace (sorry to geek out on this for a sec).  In the same way, we take the sugarcane found naturally in the area, that the native people have been eating for generations without issue. Then we refine it and send it back to the very same people to wreak havoc on their teeth.  And like many outside influences, the indigenous haven't had any exposure to the dental hygiene component we've necessarily coupled with our refined-sugar lifestyle.

So here we are.  Our culture is busy looking for the fountain of youth.  There's nutritional advice abound, pills to make us thinner and live longer.  We think technology is the key to unlocking genetics.  Technology brought us refined sugar.  Technology brought us Kryptonite.  Shoes made our feet soft.  We continue to be seduced by the red herring of creating perfection in a lab when it had already been perfected through a hundred thousand years of evolution.

So where do we go from here?  To be honest, I'm not sure.  What I do know is that it's important to recognize how people get by without health care and WebMD.  It's important to know that we can't bottle and market the genes of a Ngabe, that we can't get something for nothing.   It's important to see that as "behind" as the indigenous may seem, they seem to be doing pretty well without all the products that define our everyday lives.

Becoming a Change Agent

During our Peace Corps training over a year ago, we learned about the different "roles of the volunteer".  It was a touchy-feely session on how a volunteer is a learner, co-trainer, co-facilitator, project co-planner, mentor, and lastly, a change agent.  The excessive use of "co's" in the descriptions indicate we should be working side-by-side with the community members, empowering them to implement their own projects, etc.  At first blush, it could seem like a lot of BS handed down from on high, but I guess I'm towing the company line on the softer side of Peace Corps training.  I really do feel as a volunteer, you wear all of these hats, and, that having a vocabulary to define those roles, is a helpful tool during service.

The role that seems most controversial is that of the change agent.  The whole idea of the gringo rolling up and trying to convince a group of indigenous of a different way of life seems like history repeated.  Maybe that's not fair.  Peace Corps certainly has a different mission statement than those in our history books.  But at the end of the day I am a change agent.  What change is good?  What change is bad?  Who am I to say what is right or wrong, what should and should not be done?  And maybe that's why Peace Corps is a two-year minimum commitment.  It takes a long time to figure out what change really is a good thing.

Being a change agent has been hard.   Development work is hard.  Finding the distinction between helping and hurting takes awhile.  Example.  The government is building a road connecting the main highway to a Ngabe metropolis, Kankintu, tucked away in the river basin adjacent to mine.  The road will mean better access to employment, health services, and bringing goods to market.  It also means they've cut a path through virgin rain forest.  There's also talk of the road being used for future mining.  So do we forgo environmental stewardship to help build infrastructure to raise the standard of living of the region?  What development truly raises the standard of living?  Luckily, the scale of Peace Corps is so much smaller that volunteers can sleep well at night.  Most of the work we do involves education, building capacity within the communities so that they can help themselves long after the aid has left.

As with all my thoughts, I think about what the context will be when I return to the States.  Being a change agent back home is just as important.  Culture is fluid.  Look where we were on civil rights just 60 years ago.  That wasn't something that happened just because.  It has been a movement.  A collection of change agents have decided the course of history, have caused a cultural ebb and flow.  I feel like the two years away from my culture and my home will have made me a more informed change agent. This time peering back through the looking glass makes me excited about change back home.  What does being a change agent mean in the context of being home?

Thoughts on Ngabe Parenting

It wasn't long after I unpacked my things that I realized the style of parenting is drastically different here.  Children cry into the night, only feet away from their sleeping parents.   The parents yell and hit their children.  Two-year-olds play with machetes.  Eight-year-olds take care of the three-year-olds while their parents are in the finca.  Madness, right?

What has initially been disturbing is starting to make more sense.  So it goes.  I came with all my ideas about what is right and wrong only to have them broken down, reconstructed.  Life is hard here.  Most days involve carrying heavy things long distances, whether that's firewood or food from the finca.  Perhaps the lack of coddling is part of a necessary hardening. Young girls taking care of their even younger siblings makes a certain sense as well.  Most girls have their first child in their teens (there is no career track out here) because that's when it biologically makes sense.  If you do the math, you need to start learning how to be a mother pretty early on in life.

It's all too easy to judge those that are different.  In a world of piano lessons and ballerina classes, we can be a bit softer.  Our lives, while hectic, are cushy.  We've traded in the manual labor for schedulers and post-it reminders stuck to the bathroom mirror.  Furthermore, we have cultural cues that change over time guiding us as to how we should be parents.  It wasn't long ago that corporal punishment was OK in our schools (and still is in some places).  Now there is more of a cultural shift away from that style of parenting.  And while I don't condone leaving young children alone in the house for hours on end, it makes more sense in the context of a community of eyes watching those children.

In other words, I don't know if I'm necessarily witnessing bad parenting.  Everyone grows up able to function in their world.  Our world needs a different set of skills and social norms, so the parenting style adjusts accordingly.  At the end of the day, what seems like madness begins to make more sense.


Author's Note:  Despite the blog entry, the author fully intends on buying Baby Einstein tapes and wrapping his future child(ren) in organic cotton blankets