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.
