Dust

For days I’ve been trying to identify the substance that I inhale here from the gusts of wind, that upon contact dries up the back of my palate. It is tasteless, colorless, and ever-pervasive in these parts. It makes me want to escape it by crawling into my windowless, vent-less dorm room with fluorescent buzzing lights. As we rode out of the city and into the arid lands today, I opened the window of the taxi cab that smelled of exhaust, only to find myself suffocated with more of the stuff from the wind. I realized then, that of course – it is dust.

Like most places, there are two kinds of people in the hospital here: the doctors and the patients. But I have yet seen a place where the two differed so much. I have yet to see as good looking a group of young people as the medical students and doctors here: the young girls with their hair pulled back, makeup neatly lining their lips, clothes formal but tight-fitting and flattering; the young men with their hair slicked, dark eyes and intense eyebrows.

The patients, on the other hand, blend in with each other as though they are of a slightly different skin-tone altogether. They are browned by the dust. They come with their various colored blankets and small bags of belongings that somehow all appear brown in the distance. They come with young and old attached to them and it’s often difficult to tell who is the sick one. Their skin is grooved like dried mud, and they pile together along the walls, against the pillars, and overflow to the outside sidewalks and curbs like the inevitable and relentless brown that stains a corner, unable to be reached by the dull tools and the strained cleaning schedule available to the hospital’s caretakers. The area of the stain waxes and wanes but it is always present. People are always waiting. It’s as though the caretakers have given up and decided to continue sweeping only the areas that is most convenient, leaving the grooves to continue browning.

The patients remain just as different, just as brown once moved onto the hospital floor. Some still have hands and feet caked with dirt, only rubbed off along with gel used for the echocardiogram that marked a spot finally deserving to be hastily wiped with toilet paper. There is Martin, the 68 or so old man who has curly gray hair and particularly dark skin, lying patiently with a distorted right arm now in the shape of a banana after some accident long gone in the past. He is aphasic now, after a stroke, but smiles when I tell the other medical student in broken Spanish about how I warn my younger sister not to choose medicine if she can be happy doing anything else. There is Miguel who is only 23, and near possibly the end of his life with AIDS and presumed toxoplasmosis encroaching on his brainstem, making him appear cross-eyed and forcing his hand to dance its way to his nose when he is asked to touch it. A woman sits by him most of the time, presumably his mother. She feeds him and a matter-of-factly instructs him to follow God’s Words as she points to the cross on his chest. Finally, there is Juan, someone’s name I don’t hear called often. He is 60 but appears the size of an 8 year old child since most of his flesh is wasted away and his right leg has been shortened by an amputation. He is strapped to the bed with various make-shift restraints created from sheets and torn cloth. His eyes wander freely about the room as he is in a state of coma, and his voice is only heard as the spasms of wheezes and coughs that produce bursts of projectile sputum from his tracheostomy, landing as far as the bed across the room.

Perhaps the only items that penetrate the brownness are their eyes – framed by wrinkles, even in the young. They remain bright and flickering, grateful and content. They are eyes that have learned not to be surprised by disappointment, eyes that have seen what things can happen in life, eyes that now patiently accept the random and meager rationing of God’s gifts. They do not disapprove of the professor’s daily request to tap their fingers together to demonstrate their perhaps permanently disabled coordination, nor of being fully exposed amidst the crowd of doctors for the changing of the fluid-stained and odorous sheets beneath them. It’s as though their spirits have already become detached from their bodies and their physical frames are but the beaten vessels that shield them from the harsh sun and dust. They have transcended to a place I’ve only known through the writing of philosophers. I am envious of their freedom.

There are also two kinds of prices here – probably for the two kinds of people. There’s the two-hour bus ride to the outskirts of the mountains for 8 pesos (50 cents), and there’s the bottle of Herbal Essence for 100 pesos (8 dollars). It makes me imagine the two worlds that these two kinds of people might traverse in, the two universes of goods and culture, perhaps never needing to interface each other except at the hospital – but even there, we are divided by spaces we occupy – between beds or on them, gliding through the center of the hallway or clinging to the walls.

Today there was a man who was in a coma from Guillam Barre syndrome. Alongside him was a medical student, squeezing the balloon “ambu” bag every few seconds into a tube that fed into his lungs, supposedly keeping him alive. Another student came by and took over, but not until the next changing of the guards did I realize that there was no machine on its way – this was the way things were supposed to be. I offered to help for half an hour, both appalled by the use of manual labor in such a hasty, risky way, and empathetic towards the dire conditions it must mean we are all in. So I gloved and took over the bag, warmed by the hands of the medical students before me. I was a personal ventilator. If I stopped or malfunctioned, he would slowly drift away.

I tried to talk to Martin who was in the bed across the room. His dense mutism has melted a bit into a grumbling and I felt proud of him. I asked if he could read the sign on the wall and he walked up and read part of the first word – the name of the patient who I was keeping alive for the moment. I told him he was improving and he nodded. I asked him what had happened to his arm, and he grumbled back gesturing some object falling from the sky. For a moment, he looked longingly at his banana arm but then quickly resumed his usual content nature, shaking his head and smiling as if to say “tis is life.” I chuckled at the situation, realizing for a moment I was trying to understand a man whose language I barely spoke who is aphasic and just learning how to grumble again. But then the others in the room were catatonic and comatose and strangely we were the two that had the most to say. Several times, I looked down at the patient I was ventilating and wondered whether he was still alive. Once I even checked his pulse just to be sure, but quickly resumed bagging, fearing that he would expire without the next puff. This may have been the biggest role I played in a patient’s life for a while.

Most of my friends are other exchange students here from other countries. It makes it difficult to say that I know what it means to be Mexican. It’s much harder to write this time around. I believe it’s because I’m not so lonely. I find that the more I know about people, the less I have to write about them – they become too real for words. Maybe my writing is only limited to simple things – things I can paint with my dullish fingers. Perhaps I’m just scared that I won’t get it quite right as there are so many more mistakes to be made.

My only conclusion had been that Mexicans are very kind. I told a taxi driver this and he responded ever so wisely, ‘there are good people and bad people everywhere.’ I have been told this in many places of the world and it is a lesson I should have known by now: that culture and place runs only so deep, and underneath, people are really all the same everywhere. There are ones who give and ones who cheat, ones who worship the truth and ones who lie when it’s more convenient. It’s funny that I think I am writing to capture the flavor of different parts of the world, when in the end, below different colors of candy coating, it is all just the taste of humanity.

So far I don’t know what else to make of this place. I have shared the few thoughts I have. But I feel comfortable with this. I have learned from a friend recently that not everything makes sense at every moment, although it all may in time.