Tesorito Nueva Esperanza

                                       By Sarah Sloane

In Tesora Nueva Esperanza, everything eventually falls from the sky: coconuts (both ripe and green), wilted hibiscus blossoms, rubber tree leaves, faded jacaranda blooms, and dead branches broken off a tree. A boy’s navy blue shirt, corn husks flying towards the pigs, a girl jumping out of the tree to catch the boy’s shirt as it falls through the leaves.
A large green ball, soft and reluctant as it thumps down the dirt field behind the school. Kernels of corn that two sisters throw to the chickens. And rain, thunderous, swirling rain that falls daily on the abandoned sugar plantation where the government has relocated nearly 200 Mayan families.

July is the heart of the rainy season in El Tesorito. I got used to the thunder in the afternoon, the gray wind picking up before the rain, and the aftermath of rain: a weak drizzle down the wide leaves of the banana trees, a few late raindrops dripping out of the crowns of palm trees onto the path to the clinic. One particularly rainy afternoon, after a long meeting at the clinic, I joined Susan from CAMINOS, Ila and Miluska from St. Michael’s Project in Tucson, and Pedro, the local health promoter, as they walked through the community to visit two people who were sicker than many others: a woman suffering severe pain from a prolapsed uterus and a boy sitting on his family stoop, holding his deformed foot in both hands while he waited for us.
I already knew that there was little we could do besides record the details of individual cases and note the patterns of illness and disease. In El Tesorito, there are three new cases of malaria diagnosed each month, the first case of HIV has just been diagnosed, the whole community struggles with high rates of anemia, the book Where There Is No Doctor is missing, and the medicines to treat any of these cases is limited at best. It’s true that later we would try to raise the funds that would provide a stipend to the health promoters, buy the medicines, and deliver those medicines to the community. But right now we were simply walking with Pedro, matching our pace to his, learning what we could of these people and this place. Sometimes just presence is enough. As the Buddhists will tell you, and if nothing else, we were present.

Or at least the others were present. While they visited the sick woman inside her house, I waited outside. I knew there was little I could do, and to call my Spanish rudimentary is to give me a compliment. Besides, I was preoccupied by the afternoon light slanting into the puddles. Despite years of imperfect Buddhist practice, I don’t have a clue how to really be there, to be present. I’d rather put the toe of my sandal into the edge of a puddle and watch it ripple.

After visiting the woman, our group lumbered down the hill towards the small boy’s house. We walked through some puddles, circumvented seven or eight piglets snuffling in the bare dirt, and edged behind a huge pig tied to a wide-trunked tree. At the bottom of the hill we slipped past a homemade fence and the low-hanging trees. A young woman in the yard was weaving cloth of brilliant blue, a hoop around her dress. When she saw us, she ran to get her parents.

In a few minutes, the parents, the young woman from the yard, and a small girl were sitting on the front porch of their tiny cinder block house, and we had arranged ourselves opposite them on a couple of wood planks balanced between two stumps. All of us were looking at the small boy sitting alone on the stoop. I wasn’t daydreaming anymore. I was definitely present. You will think I am exaggerating, but at the moment I first saw that boy I felt the sky lean in closer, its wings tangling in the trees. Everything falls from the sky in El Tesorito, but where does the sky itself fall from? I felt it coming down.
He was about four. The boy’s foot was attached to his leg at the wrong angle, hanging practically useless to the side while his shin bone stood on the ground. His expression was dignified but sad, his mouth down-turned. While we were there, he never once laughed, smiled, or spoke. Small flies gathered in the corners of his eyes, and his hands were like frozen claws from the fatigue of walking with his hands in the holes of the short wood crutches that his father had made for him. The crutches were shaped like saws.

The other health workers were already doing their job, taking notes, adjusting a camera, and talking to the parents of the child. One of them spoke at length to the parents, and I recognized the Spanish words for “doctor’s evaluation,” for “hospital,” and for “amputation,” and I noticed the child did not flinch from anything said. But I was also watching the sky enfold us all into its net: the uneven wood fences, the pigs, the weaving and tortilla-making going on in the larger community, the men working in the corn fields. I felt the sky start to slip; it entered my bones and softened them, and I fought back tears. But the boy just sat there looking at the ground. Just then a white hen flew up from the ground, squawking and angry, her wings beating furiously as she headed for my face. I ducked my head at the last moment and she swished through my hair instead, diving over my shoulder and landing on the dirt yard behind me. And then, the sky did collapse entirely around me. It really did start to rain again. I really did start to cry, although I made sure no one saw me. But the boy did not move or speak. He continued to sit silent as a stone, sucking on a candy that a health volunteer had given to him, staring straight ahead, utterly still, the sky having already fallen down for him a long time ago.