Chapter 2

On day three in Oaxaca, México, after spending all of our first day sitting through orientations and lectures about how to be safe in a colonial Catholic town, it was exciting to finally receive our cell phones, which meant I could finally give out my number to the world and have a viable connection to a native English speaker who wasn’t enduring a similar sort of culture shock as myself.

The director of the language school handed out small boxes with 1998 Nokia-style phones, and upon receiving mine I realized that my box not only looked cleaner and less beat-up than everyone else’s, but upon opening it, I found something truly eye-opening. It appeared as though God had separated the Oaxacan rain clouds and said, “Joel, for once, I’m going to let you win.” As I pulled out a shiny brand new flip phone the inner voice of my head reminded me of the truth: you don’t deserve this, it whispered in a sinister tone, everyone else has a gnarly pixelated phone; something has gone horribly wrong. You know that you usually don’t receive nice things for no reason. I tried my best to silence it, when Sarah, the second-year medical student from New York, interrupted my thoughts.

“Wow, you got a nice one,” she complimented.
“Oh, it’s really nothing,” I said, knowing fully that it truly was.

“No, wow, I’ve never seen them give out a flip phone before. They must like you,” said Serena, our local coordinator who has been through the program many times.
“Do you really think so?”

The next five minutes of Oaxacan introduction was what I refer to as “me time,” during which I pictured what Sanda and Marta, the directors of the language school, were thinking when they chose me for the prized gem. “That Joel Miller character,” they would say. “He’s really something, isn’t he?”

Naturally, though, after programming the phone with each of the cell phone numbers of what I personally referred to as the “cellular peasants,” I had to trade the cell phone in. After hours of trying to convince myself that “no red” means “congratulations on your new phone” rather than “no network,” my host sisters informed me that I had no other choice. I now can play Snake (or what is called Serpiente here) on my 1999 Nokia.

The next day we started our clinical rotations. Most locations last one week, while some of the larger hospitals last two. Our medical director, Dr. Tenorio, drove two from our group, César and Amanda (pre-medical students from Harvard and Princeton, respectively), to clinics at 7:30 in the morning and took the remainder, Sarah, Samuel and I (Samuel a pre-medical student from Oregon State) at 8:30. I often ask César and Amanda if I can have their autographs, and though they give me one every time (and are beginning to act as though it’s an old joke I’ve recycled too many times), I think that they find that all of the work they put in to admissions essays and applications in high school pays off a little more every time they’re asked to give an autograph.

I started my first week at a small, government-funded rural clinic called Centro de Salúd Xochimilco. Over thirty Centro de Salúds exist in the state of Oaxaca, and they give primary and family practice care to rural and urban patients. Of the few patients I did see, the most interesting one was a frail elderly woman who appeared from a Mexican soap opera.

“Doctor,” she said, exacerbated, leaning forward to my preceptor. “You have to help me. I have a lot of problems.”

After a list of pains and bumps that she showed to us, I decided that one of her first problems is that she didn’t know her age. She took a stab at 73, and said she had a birthday coming up in May. When the doctor informed her that it was currently June, she said half-heartedly, “oh. Maybe 74 then.”

Seventy-one was the correct answer, and was found after looking up her birth date in her chart. My favorite pain of hers was in her arm: “I squeeze lemons with this hand to make lemon water,” she said, which is a normal enough Mexican career. “And the other day, my bicep was so swollen that my nephew called me a luchador!”

A luchador is a Mexican wrestler, one who usually wears silly masks such that his identity not be leaked to the prying public. They attempt superhero status, though I’ve never been impressed and think of their wrestling more as a partner dance in a ring with other muscular men. The whole spectacle is sort of similar to watching a small dog mount a larger one. Sure, it may work, but it can’t be that fun for either involved, embarrassing even, and while we watch, though can’t determine why, we can’t stop. Nor can we stop the sinful deed of that ambitious canine.

Picturing the small woman as a luchador made me imagine her in the ring, thousands of fans wondering why they had purchased these tickets in the first place, staring down her 280 pound opponent down with her ever-present scowl. I imagine the image jumped across the doctor’s mind, too, as she was laughing for almost as long as I was.

It turned out that the woman did, in fact, have many problems, only one of which I had enough medical knowledge to vouch for. After smoking for fifty years, she said, “I’m seventy-four, and once in a while I want to have a cigarette, so I smoke, and I like it.” This was directly after the doctor’s offer to help her quit. I considered correcting her: remember, maim, that we determined today you are actually only seventy-one, so you can’t claim that your age is a reason for your bad habits. Before I had a chance to speak up, I was invited to listen to her lung sounds, which were markedly more diminished than any I’ve ever heard before.

And at the end of the day, I returned and tried to call home, but the buttons on the aged Nokia were stuck, and require a few hours before a new attempt.