13
Chapter Thirteen
There was one drugstore in Indi Urcu, and it was the shop I most liked to visit. It was small, but wonderfully neat, with a very high ceiling and rows and rows of bottles and boxes, many of which had familiar brand names of imported preparations. The smell of the place was antiseptic and fresh, a welcome change from the hot grease and garlic odors of the stuffy shops. The little man who ran the drugstore was as neat as his shop; he wore a white coat with a comb sticking out of the breast pocket and his hair was always impeccably slicked. He treated me with great deference, always searching out the American product when a European or Ecuadorian one would have served. He never called me madamita—it was “Ah! La señorita! Buenos Mas, señorita!” whenever I came in, and I had the feeling that he understood my position in the town—he knew it was difficult, he knew I wanted to help people, and he was one with me in the desire, for he wanted very much to help me.
I stopped in one morning on my way to the post office and as I finished making my small purchase an Indian with a deep gash in his head came in asking for a remedy. When he confessed that he had no money the little druggist rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and lifted his palms with a shrug.
“No hay que ham.” Nothing can be done.
The Indian pressed a rag to his neck, where blood was staining his collar, looked helplessly from the druggist to me and started toward the door.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“I have no money,” he said.
“That is not important,” I told him. “Let me buy you something.”
He eyed me dubiously, while the druggist watched me with mild amusement.
“What happened?” I said.
“I was working on a house. A big beam fell on my head.”
“Where is the boss?”
“He told me not to work anymore.”
“Did he say he would pay for your medicine?” As soon as I asked the question I saw from the feces of both men how naive it was.
“He said Go, señorita. The boss said Go.”
“But he paid you for your work?”
“Not today, señorita. He just said Go.”
I bought some Mercurochrome and adhesive tape and did the best I could to make a bridge over the wound. It was hard to make the tape stick to the bloodied hair, and it was equally hard to make him believe that he did not owe me any money. The druggist took my payment without a word while the Indian stood, hat in hand, by the door, still wondering what was expected of him. I wanted very much to ask his name, but feared he would think I intended to track him down for payment, so I merely said, “Until another day,” and he answered, “May God pay you,” and followed me out.
Oh, this town, this white man’s town! Even my little drugstore and my nice little man. But I had met another Indian, as it were by chance. Surely God had ordained the meeting, for He was with me.
The sun shone as it nearly always did in the mornings, and the marketplace was buzzing. I saw here and there friends I had made, greeted them, happy to find them in their accustomed stalls, and then my steps quickened toward the post office. It was a never fading delight to go there, past the stamp kiosks, past the little boy who sold magazines on the steps, into the dark little rotunda walled with boxes, each with its tiny window and brass keyhole. “As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.” That was it. Today there was just one letter. It had an Ecuadorian stamp. Woodrow Rogers in Guayaquil. I tore it open.
“You will be sorry to learn that the Gardners have finally been rejected by the mission on medical grounds. We know how you have looked forward to their coming to work with you, to establish the school. The board feels that if you would prefer to be transferred to a station with another couple on it this might be worked out, although we would be reluctant to see Indi Urcu without a worker. . . .
“God’s ways are not our ways. This is of course a great disappointment to all of us, but we must accept it from Him.”
Indi Urcu without a worker. No, I could not consider that. I knew that the place in the vineyard to which God had most certainly brought me was His place for me to stay, and although, by worldly standards, it was not an enviable position, it was the object of my most cherished ambitions, a corner of the earth in which to serve my Master, a people to call my people. Would I be willing to labor on alone? The idea of being a solitary missionary was not unthinkable to me—after all, if I had faced the possibility of never marrying (and what calling could more effectively reduce one’s chances, if the statistics I had seen were correct? Sixteen women to one man!)—if I was willing to be single, I should be willing to work alone. This kind of hardship fitted in with what I had half expected. But some kind of revision in my outlook was called for. How was I to accept a negative answer to so many people’s prayers? The Gardners had been thoroughly prayed for. They had gone so far as to sell their home, they had booked a passage, they had bought their outfit. They had their financial support pledged by several churches, and at the last minute they were stopped by what seemed a very minor physical disability. Could not God have seen to that? It was not mere companionship for a single woman that was at stake. It was not simply the plans of a mission board or a family that had gone awry. The needs of a whole section of Indian population would be unmet. Even if another couple were found to take their place, what of the scores who daily passed into eternity during the delay? I could agree that God’s ways are not our ways, all right. But why did we insist on trying to make them so? Was it possible, after all, that the reasons for the shortage of missionaries were sometimes inscrutable, not to be explained so simply as ‘The church of God is asleep”?
I walked slowly out of the post office, wondering where to turn. The market with its pushing women and their baskets, its jostling men and beasts, its reeking stalls, ordinarily a merely bustling place, seemed to me now in a frenzy of business. If I could just sort them out, shut them up, carry them off to some quiet place, apart, where I could sit them down and say to them, Listen. God wants to speak to you. But no. That was of course out of the question, and I could only clench the letter in my hand and send up a desperate prayer, Lord God, how will You get through to them?
I worked my way along the sidewalk. My part, the translation of the Scriptures, ought to go hand in hand with other aggressive efforts to help the people. Education was the obvious wedge, and the Gardners were supposed to do that. Now what would happen? Nobody to start a school, no bait to catch the Indians.
There was a sign over a door that I passed, “Se pone inyecciones” and lettered faintly on the door itself was the word “Clinica.” I had assumed when I first saw that sign that it meant the presence of a doctor, but shad learned that there was no doctor nearer than Wairapamba. A woman who did not even qualify as a nurse had been authorized to give injections, and this was the extent of medical service in the village. Perhaps it was medicine that would provide the wedge if education would not. The idea took hold at once—not that I had had any training, but there might be a lot I could do with common sense and compassion, and was it mere coincidence that I had treated the wounded Indian, received the letter, and noticed again that sign, all within an hour?
I began carrying along a small bag of medicines on my visits to the Indians—aspirin, worm medicine, DDT powder for the ubiquitous head lice, a few first-aid things. Nearly always there were minor needs which I could meet, but often the Indians wanted to know why I did not have a needle to stick them with. “A needle, señorita, is good for anything. Why do you not have a needle?” I explained that I was not a doctor, but this was hardly an explanation to them.
There was a pregnant girl in the house up beyond Rosa’s—I had talked to her several times, a girl not more than seventeen, with an unusually Oriental look about her smooth, high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes, and she wore delicate gold earrings in her pierced ears. I would hardly have guessed she was pregnant, for she carried herself beautifully and wore full skirts, but Rosa mentioned it casually one day and I thought how exciting it would be if the girl would let me help in her delivery. It took some nerve on my part to suggest this to her, for I had never done more than watch two births, when a nurse friend of mine, before I came to Ecuador, had secured permission for me to do this in a hospital. I had read one book on midwifery which said that clean hands and common sense were the two basic requirements, and I was confident that I could meet those at least, which was probably more than the old Indian women who were called in to help could have done. Their brand of “common sense,” I feared, was often nothing more than superstition. The girl nodded noncommittally at my proposal.
“You send someone to call me when the pain starts,” I said.
“Arí,” she said.
“I would like very much to come and help you,” I said.
“Arí.”
A few weeks later Rosa told me the girl had died in childbirth. Why hadn’t they called me? How had she died? Rosa did not know. Was the child living? Oh no, it, too, had died.
“How sad,” I said.
“Oh well, señorita, it was a wind child.”
“A wind child?”
“That’s what it was.”
“And what is a wind child?”
“A child born of the wind. It had no other father.” And Rosa rubbed her grindstone over the corn.
“But the poor girl. Perhaps if they had called me I could have saved her.”
“Perhaps so, perhaps not” Back and forth went the stone. Rosa was right. Perhaps not. And what sort of beginning would that have made?
I kept on the watch for opportunities I might dare to use. I did not want really serious cases if I could avoid them, for I knew how dangerous my little knowledge might be. But I found an item in the newspaper one day about a case of smallpox which had been discovered in a town about twenty miles from Indi Urcu. The government had been vaccinating school children wherever there was a local doctor who could carry out the program. I found from the principal of the Indi Urcu school that he would be only too glad to allow the children to be vaccinated if I could find a doctor who would come. Lynn Anderson had traveled much in the mountains, holding clinics and cooperating with local authorities in medical work, and I wrote to my mission board asking if I might invite her to come and spend a few days with me, vaccinating the children and visiting Indian homes. It might be possible, I added, to announce a clinic to be held in my home during that time, and this could prove an opening wedge in the town as well as in the Indian community.
Lynn’s schedule was full, but she arranged to come. I spent hours going from one Indian house to another, inviting them to come to the clinic. I was mystified one afternoon to see a bus stop at my gate—one of those great, swollen wooden things with no aisle down the center into which Indians packed themselves for interminable, airless journeys through the thin atmosphere of the high altitude. What on earth was it doing stopping at my gate? Lynn got off. A small boy swung her sleek blue suitcase off the top of a pile of burlap sacks on the roof of the bus and she came in, looking unrumpled and chic in a gray wool suit with a dark red silk scarf tying her hair back.
“Lynn! Why, I never dreamed you’d have to come in one of those things! Oh dear, the journey must have been awful! I sort of thought maybe Mr. MacDonald . . .”
“Why, it was nothing at all. We had a lovely ride, and the driver was so kind as to bring me up here after he’d let off the other passengers in the plaza.”
Dear Lynn! How wonderful of her to come. How exciting it would be to show her around the town, to take her to see my Indians.
There were forty-six children in the school, and seven of these were Indians, the sons of “free Indians,” the schoolteacher told me. When I asked what this meant, he explained that many of the Indians in the area were the property of white landowners and did not own their land or their homes. Those who had sent their sons to school had learned through hard experience in the market that white men had a strong advantage over them because they could read and do fast arithmetic. So they had sent their children to school, even though it was very expensive for the children to board in town and it was out of the question for them to walk from their own homes daily.
When the teacher, a young white man in his late twenties, lined up the children for their vaccinations, the seven Indian children were at the end of the line. When they sat down again, I noticed that their seats were at the rear of the room and instead of individual desks like the others’ they had a table between them.
The procedure was very simple. I swabbed the arm with alcohol, Lynn scratched it with a needle and applied the vaccine. The teacher maintained the strictest discipline, ordering his pupils around with short, sharp commands. His commands to the Indian children, it seemed to me, were shorter yet, and considerably sharper. One small boy had a hard time rolling his sleeve up high enough to suit Lynn.
“Hurry up! Caramba!” said the teacher and cuffed the back of the child’s head.
The teacher had given no explanation to the children of the need for vaccine. They submitted willingly to the treatment, though fear showed in some of their faces. Little knowledge did they have of the disease from which they were being protected, much less any desire to be saved from it. If only missionary work were so simple, I reflected. If people could be corralled and injected, like so many cattle branded, without explanation or persuasion or personal sense of need. I had heard missionaries say, “I gave him the Gospel!” as though it had been an injection, and now, as the comparison presented itself, I began to ponder just how important it might be that an individual be prepared for the Gospel. Lynn talked quietly to the children as she vaccinated, and I could feel the tension ease. They even seemed sorry when it was time for us to go, for they saw that she was their friend.
As we left the building, it was gratifying to think of it as a little island of safety, where forty-six human beings were now beyond the reach of a serious disease, simply because Lynn and I had come and spent an hour there.
We walked back up the street toward my house and saw the valley spread out before us, an endless stretch of tiny square fields and little thimble houses sheltering hundreds and thousands of people who were in jeopardy from the same disease, and did not know it. What of them? I spoke of this to Lynn.
She had a way of not responding immediately, of walking on as though she had not heard, and this time, when she was silent, I thought what a bromide my question must have seemed to her. Her reply, however, simple and direct, registered no scorn: “Yes. I suppose anyone who tries to help people in anyway soon becomes overwhelmed with the endlessness of the task. So he has two choices. He can give up at the start, or he can accept his limitations and go on doing what he can.”
Accept his limitations. This was an idea I had not thought very much about. I was serving the God of the Impossible. Words like “vision” and “challenge” flashed like illuminated captions over my picture of missionary life, and, as I walked along the road with Lynn and my eyes swept the vast bowl of the valley, they still seemed appropriate captions. But when we turned in at my front gate and found the yard filled with people who had heard by the village grapevine of the presence of the doctors americana the words blinked out again. Here before us was a definable task, a smaller sacrifice, a commoner duty. The people were mostly of the mestizo or cholo class—of mixed Indian and white blood, the women with long braids and plaid shawls and shoes and stockings, the men in blue jackets and rope sandals or shoes.
They were silent as we came into the yard, but when we opened the door they pressed around us, trying to get first place.
“I have been here many hours, doctora, and I am very sick.”
“My daughter here, please, doctors, she is very grave.”
“Do me the favor, señorita doctors, of attending to me, for the love of God!”
Lynn smiled kindly at them and explained that we were not yet ready to see patients, but that she would do her best to see them all in turn. I looked eagerly to see if there were any Indians in the crowd. Their needs were so great, and they had so little means for meeting them. They seldom had money to buy even drugstore medicines, and would not dream of going to Wairapamba to consult a doctor. Why had they not come? The Indians knew the doctor was coming, but there was not a single Indian in the group.
As I set water on the stove to boil and began spreading sheets on the table and laying out bandages and medicines according to Lynn’s instructions, I tried to see how it was all to work. I had come to Indi Urcu to minister to Indians, and the means introduced for reaching them succeeded only in bringing to my door white people, those to whom not only did I feel no call, but whose presence inhibited the Indians’ coming. It was ironic and I could work up little enthusiasm for the work ahead of us this afternoon. At least it would be good experience, for I could watch Lynn and learn from her and perhaps God would let me use the knowledge gained to help Indians in the future. If I were going to settle for the possible, which I had almost disdained, it was only in the hope that ultimately the impossible would be attained. The cholos came at the first invitation (which had not really been meant for them), to offer their aches and pains to the doctor and to take from her whatever she chose to give. The Indians, whose aches and pains were far deeper and less curable, did not come. They had received the invitation, but they did not come. They had not learned to ask anything of the white man. They had learned, instead, to bear their own burdens and this they did, day after day, year in and year out, in the loneliness of the high Andes, in the cold of their tireless huts, on the windswept plains of the grass country where their sheep grazed, and in the hostile white man’s village where they knew they were despised. It was their life, and they did not dream that it could be changed.
We took the patients one by one into the living room and Lynn listened to their complaints, many of which seemed to have to do with the liver or kidneys. They were mostly women, and they screwed up their feces with pain and doubled over, a hand kneading the ailing area as they described the attacks. There were one or two cases of advanced tuberculosis, a man with a hernia which had been operated on in a hospital in Riobamba, but they had sewed his insides into knots, Lynn said, and nothing would help him but another operation. There was a young girl, her face gray with pain, who had what she called an earache that hurt her whole head. Mastoid, Lynn said, and nothing could be done for her unless she would go to a hospital. The girl turned in silence to her hovering young husband.
“Is it very serious, doctora?” he asked.
“Yes, it is serious. She must go to a hospital.”
“Can’t you cure her here?”
“No, I can do nothing for her here except give her a pill for the pain. But her ear will only get worse.”
“Will they want to operate in the hospital? Will they cut?”
“They will have to operate.”
The man stood silent for a moment, fear growing in his eyes. “Is there no other remedy?”
“No. I am very sorry.”
The girl shifted the baby in her shawl, her great dark eyes moving from Lynn to her husband and back again.
The man murmured a syllable to her and they went out. Hospital was out of the question for them. Who would pay? The despair in their feces found no answer.
There was no time for lunch. Throughout the afternoon they came, for word spreads rapidly in the sierra in spite of great distances. The foreign doctor was there, and was not charging anything for consultations. She tried to collect a nominal fee for the medicines she dispensed but that was all. A few gave promise of a chicken or a sack of potatoes when they came again.
I learned to give an injection and took notes as fast as I could on the questions Lynn asked and the treatments she gave. A sketchy way to learn medicine but far better than nothing, I told myself, and it was likely that the same maladies would recur in this area.
There were various cases of malnutrition—strange bone formations, goiters, rashes and skin eruptions, anemia. Lynn prescribed vitamins and iron pills, fruits and vegetables, but the people nodded so enthusiastically that we could not help feeling they had no intention of following any consistent course of treatment. They were willing to swallow a pill or two today, but they would see no need for it tomorrow, especially if the pain was lessened at all. As for eating fruits and vegetables, how absurd. They had come to the doctor for medicine, not for food. They themselves knew what to eat.
At the end of the day, as the sun began to drop behind the mountains, I looked out to see how many patients remained. I was astonished to find Pedro just coming in the gate.
“Buenas tardes, Pedro,” I said.
“Buenas tardes, señorita. Is the doctora here?”
“Yes. You have come to see her?”
“Yes.”
He came in silently and began to roll up his trouser leg until we could see a deep, festering wound in the muscle of his calf.
“How did you do that?” asked Lynn.
“It is cut, doctora.”
“With a knife, no?”
“It hurts me very much.”
“How long have you had it?”
“A long time.”
Lynn knew there would be no more information forthcoming and set about cleansing and bandaging the wound. Then she administered an injection of penicillin and instructed Pedro to come back for three days in a row so that I could put the needle into him again. She went over again with me the procedure for the injection, and wrote down the dosage.
“Sí, señorita,” said Pedro.
“Three more days, Pedro. Tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that”
“Sí, señorita.”
“You will not forget?”
He smiled faintly. “Why would I forged”
“You must be exhausted,” I said to Lynn when we finally sat down to supper. “How many did we have?”
“I didn’t keep count,” she said.
“I should think there were sixty or seventy at least,” I said.
“I suppose so. A beginning anyway. If only we could get them to follow up the treatment. That is what is so disheartening about village clinics—some of the cases are beyond help outside a hospital, most of them require a simple but regularly continued treatment—and this, too, is hopeless unless you can follow it up yourself. The people just don’t see the need for it”
“You must see some spectacular cures now and then, don’t you?—cases which make you feel it’s worthwhile?”
“Yes,” she said, and the pause this time was longer than usual. “I see some spectacular things all right. But I no longer look for things to make it as you say, worthwhile.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure I can make you understand what I mean.” She stirred her tea and laid the silver spoon carefully in the saucer and then raised her eyes, which were gray and widely spaced. The tiny lines around them, the weariness, did not cloud their kindness.
“You see, when I decided to be a doctor, it was because I wanted to help people. I thought, of course, that I could help people by being a doctor. So I went through seven years of study, and I came to Ecuador anticipating the good I was going to do. Gradually I came to see that the results which can be called good are few. And they cannot be the criterion for whether or not what we do is worthwhile. It is hopeless to try to weigh up the good, the bad, the futile, and the merely harmless, and hope that there will be enough of the good—in medical work, enough unequivocal cures—to justify all the rest. Do you follow me?”
“I don’t know. I think so. I mean, if the good doesn’t justify the rest—is that what you said?” Lynn nodded. “Then what does?”
“Jesus told us to do what is true. I think the truth needs no justification, no defense.”