I’m alive, and
I’m well. Well, sort of well. My wisdom teeth are fine, but the stitches are
starting to come out of my gums. (It’s pretty attractive.) It’s like I have two
mosquito bites in the inside of my mouth. I’m also coming down with a head
cold, probably due to a combination of the pollution and the stress of
traveling and not sleeping in my own bed and the chain smokers in the hotel
that we’re staying at. Breathing is becoming way more of a challenge than it
should be.
But those, when
all things are said and done, are minor complaints. As I’ve mentioned numerous
times before, I’m here with Health Horizons International (HHI). This is my
second trip to the DR, and I’m working in the same community that I worked in
last year called Pancho Mateo. Last January, our group from Tufts conducted a
comprehensive health survey and found that the major public health issues
identified by the community were related to sanitation and access to
uncontaminated water. It’s been amazing to go back to Pancho and see the same
buildings and the same people. What’s even better is being welcomed into the
community once again.
One familiar
face belongs to a community health worker for HHI, and our group really
connected with him last year. He’s our age (and he’s so totally my Facebook
friend). When we walked into Pancho for the first time on Sunday, he was so
excited to talk about the project that he and his buddies started working on in
November. They formed a working group to address those same
community-identified needs that we uncovered in January, most specifically in
regards with water. They have started drafting letters to the government and to
private contractors in order to install the proper plumbing and to fix water
pressure. The ultimate goal is to ensure that everyone in their community can
easily access and use clean, safe water.
Excuse my
French, but this is a public health practitioner’s wet dream. This is a group
of twenty-somethings coming together to address issues within their own
community, to try to make their community a safer and healthier place using
their own resources and their own knowledge. It is an independent movement, and
the group is energized and willing. But this group, composed of my peers, does
not have the financial resources to make their project a reality. Another one
of the founders said to me, in pretty good English I should add, “Our dream is
to have clean water in the community. We need money to do that.”
What kills me is
that I – along with the rest of the students that I am traveling with – have
access to that material wealth. We know how to find and to write grants and how
to properly plan a project. We can create timelines and can draft letters.
These are the resources that we can provide, and I am struggling with the fact
that we are not providing that kind of support for this water project. We are
not effectively tapping into the energy of the community members.
This trip has
been more emotionally draining than I thought it would be, in large part
because I am struggling to find this balance between organization and
community. I got angry yesterday, and I rarely get really angry. Why shouldn’t
we be helping their project, when they so clearly know what they want to
achieve? What justification does anyone have to not wholeheartedly support them
in their quest for something as simple as clean water? These are the questions
that I am grappling with right now, and I know there are no easy answers
because if there were, then development issues would not be of global concern.
All I do know is
that I am angry and I want to do something, and it is incredibly refreshing and
exciting to know that I have that kind of energy. And I don’t care how cheesy
that sounds (especially since I’m posting it all up on the Internet).
P.S. Apologies for the lack of pictures on this one, friends. I
promise that my next post will be way more visually appealing, with much less
text and only slightly less sass and snark.
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