If you light a light for somebody it will also brighten your path – Buddha

It has been a while since I have posted. October 2015 to be exact. However, there certainly has not been a lack of excitement or intrigue from our side. In December Ian and I made the long trip home to Michigan….and Minnesota and Tennessee. Our carbon footprint was not small, to say the least.  Of course it was good to see family, some we have not hugged in person for almost two years. Far too long for those who we call Loved.

Ian and I both remain ever so busy with school. Ian completed his most difficult semester yet, one that was shrouded in statistics and the hieroglyphic type symbols that mathematicians call logic. He also ran IQ tests and personality profiles on several friends and myself; thankfully he remains neutral in all judgments and has promised to remain married despite the results.  The little smarty also continues to receive book after book in the mail….I wonder if there is a DSM diagnosis for closet book reader or hoarder of knowledge. It is actually quite beautiful to watch him smell the books as they come in, opening them with fascination and respect He is a book whisperer, I swear.

I have been trotting along in my program as well. It seems somewhat unfair that Ian has had so much work and mine feels like a natural extension of what I would already be reading and of myself; It has proven to be my hearts desire and calling. 

I recently returned from Guatemala serving on another medical mission with the organization Salud Y Paz (health and peace).  We traveled to villages high in the Guatemalan mountains where access to health care is extremely limited. As a matter of fact, our highest clinic was at 8,000 ft. so it felt very much like Nepal. Perhaps this is why I also felt an immediate connection to the traditional culture and geography.  With only three providers, a pediatrician, an ER doctor, and myself, we saw over 750 patients. As you can imagine it was extremely busy, but profoundly rewarding.

Prior to departing I stumbled across an organization called Lucky Iron Fish (luckyironfish.com) which makes a cast iron fish that helps fight anemia. By simply cooking with their fish a family can receive all their daily requirements of iron each day. And better yet, the fish can be used over and over again for up to 5 years. Knowing that anemia is a major cause of illness and health disparity in low resource settings I set out to get as many fish as I could. Thanks to generous donations from my Clinic I was able to take 25 fish with me to Guatemala.

 

This is the first time I have ever done something like this so I really had no idea how well this concept would be accepted or adopted within a new culture. Well.....I can now say that in Guatemala, it was extremely accepted and appreciated. The thought of providing their families with ongoing "vitamins" was very exciting to the Guatemalan mothers who received the fish.  I loved watching my Spanish and Quiche (Mayan language) interpreters explain what the fish was for and how it was used. Smile after smile (but not often caught on camera) the mothers thanked me for the gifts of health. Silently I thanked the donors and the Creator for allowing me to be in a position to provide. Who am I after all?

Another popular gift I brought was my now famous (or at least famous with the group I travel with) purses and seemingly endless supply of donated MatchBox cars.  A nurse from my office gave me about 50 cars that her son no longer needed and another staff member bought several to donate as well. In addition, our phlebotomist and her mother made several little purses to give to the children. I whipped out about 50 myself prior to leaving; some purses and Iron Fish bags were even made of Ian's up-cycled jeans; the Guatemalan's got a kick out of this. 

Regardless, the outpouring of love from those in my life is always tremendously touching. I get to physically experience the excitement and smiles when I give a little boy a car or a little girl a purse, however, they only get to hear. Still, words cannot express how thankful I am for their generosity and selfless donations. It is a rare exception that you find such genuine goodness and love expressed so automatically and without question as found in them. In a world of turmoil, goodness not only still exists, but it is still very much alive. 

What really struck me about the Guatemalan / Mayan people was that they seemed to have no concept of poverty.   As a Western outsider avoidance of this discomfort was been taught from a very young age. As a matter of fact, we all make great strides to acquire more, store more, and secure our future through complicated bonds and retirements.   However, when we want to understand something, we cannot just stand outside and observe it, we have to enter deeply into it and be one with it in its entirety. To understand a person living in poverty we have to feel their feelings, suffer their sufferings, and enjoy their joys. We have to allow them to penetrate our entire being. So thats what I did. 

When a little girl excitedly asked if the stuffed animal was for her to keep (Is it for me?! Is it for me?!), when a little boy races his MatchBox car with his brother, both laughing and giggling in pure happiness, when an older women cries at the early loss of her son and her husband due to the irrevocable diseases of poverty, or when I see the tired eyes of a man who works in the fields all day long for $3 per day, I tried to experience them and all of their feelings, sufferings, and joys. Truly in our life, being in the skin of another is perhaps the greatest form of understanding. 

And in this meditative form of awareness I remembered that "want" and "desire" create the duality of suffering. So for a person who has neither, their experience of life is different and even more, their poverty may not exist at all. When I looked at the tattered clothing of all the children we saw, the pants we call floods, the shoes we call useless, the hands we call dirty, I only saw peace. They may lack power and choice, but they do not lack intellect and joy. 

It was watching the children play that I realized they truly have no idea that they are living in poverty. As a result, they are free to Be and free to elude the sufferings of want and desire that plague so many of us in the developed world. Priceless. 

So, my aim is to longer to view them as marginalized or less than due to their outer presentations, to no longer see the negative and make a judgment or calculation based on exteriors but to change my hardwiring to experience the person in understanding and enter into the deeper realization of what it means to be human. For that is where the Kingdom of riches is found.

At this very moment what do you need to be full of joy? How uncomfortable can you be with the tattered materialism that hold little value in life? How radical can you be in another's skin? How radical can you live in your own? For you I pray that this year be one of spiritual growth, renewal, awareness, and most of all understanding.