Our last clinic day. Always bittersweet.
Kelly’s devotion this morning strengthens my own of yesterday. Yahweh Jireh=the Lord will see to it. He asks me to trust His timing. He asks me to be willing to obey. He encourages me to be attentive to His provisions. He does not ask me to figure everything out and assure follow through and completion; those are His jobs. This frees me to be present with each person He brings before me knowing that He will see to the rest.
I watch the pink, blue, green, orange, turquoise and yellow homes with their tree trunk fences fly past my bus window. There are no two the same.
Along the river’s edge, I find lily pad lawns from dried up flooding; The dense tropical growth of the mango, avocado and white fluffball palm trees are interspersed with the evergreens and alternate with the wide open many colored grass fields: wild, red grasses in the center of tall, maroon, brown and yellow fern stalks. They sway in the wind changing colors with the movement.
I am greeted my the familiar face of my new friend. Gilhenia is what I hear but my triplets, Katya, Karen and Karina Jimenez Leon, write her name as Virginia. She may be short in stature but she is big in personality and grand in smile. She is full of questions I don’t understand even after I say Hablo espanol poquito… I use all my codes to why don’t you have internet? Did you resign try to convey I haven’t a clue and finally I shrug my shoulders. When she still persists, we walk up the path hand in hand to seek a code talker/interpreter. It turns out I am an examiner after all. What I anticipated was a short chat became a complicated history taking reassurance-giving Convo. Yes, Virginia, you are just fine.
I know some Spanish and French and Creole, Navajo, Swahili but I have trouble accessing the language placed before me. As a result, I am slow to even say ‘Hola’ or ‘Gracias’ because I am filtering through several other languages. I feel so foolish yet at the same time it makes me imagine heaven.There, I’ll be able to speak whatever language comes out of my mouth and it will be understood! And, yes Anne, it will be so fine.
Santiago is back and becomes our constant companion again. His shirt reads “Spread your own ideas” and I add: not disease. It becomes our pseudo motto in nutrition.
By day’s end, he will have landed 90 botella flips. We count together and cheer with every one. Joe joins us in the 20’s and soon catches up as the competition heats up.
Daniella Marcella, who is 4ish, joins us with her unquenchable fire. She begins with cautious watching but commits her whole small self when I offer her a botella of her own. She literally spends every subsequent minute all morning working her skill and mimicking my excitement with each successful landing. I marvel at her persistence and joy.
Early in the day. Virginia’s husband Hector comes to me just as Abraham, a seminary student and one of our interpreters, walks past. I snag Abraham so that he can tell me what Hector needs. It seems that Hector saw one of our examiners yesterday just as Virginia had but Hector had forgotten to mention his sore arm. It seems that Hector had injured his arm sometime in the past and it has continued to hurt every day until now. I assessed it and found a monstrously tight knot, much like those I have on my back which I once named after my oldest boys, David and Peter. It just so happens that we have a skilled medical student on the team and she has mad skills with relieving muscle pain. I asked her to fit Hector in. She was very busy all day but right at the end of our day, I brought long-suffering Hector to her and after only a few minutes, the knot was released and Virginia was taught how to intervene in the future. Hector was so pleased he found me to tell me, in rapid, excited Spanish, how grateful he was. It was a sweet way to end our clinic time in Mexico.
Tripping with God: Stories of Faith and Inspiration 