Day Fifteen

I am now a part of a club within PSF, which all the most established folks are members of: the club of those who have contracted a disease while here in Pisco. For me it is the most common: parasites, giardia in my case. The gassy bellies and unpleasant times in the bathroom finally led yesterday to me waking up with a splitting headache and all the other symptoms of a really nasty hangover, the only difference being that I hadn't been drinking at all the night before. After stumbling to the gas station to get a bottle of water, I accepted that, two weeks into my stay here, I would have to take a sick day, and that it would be on Thanksgiving. As a result I spent Thanksgiving of 2011 being acutely thankful for antibiotics, as it turned out that the cipro my travel doc gave me in case I got traveler's diarrhea, works pretty well against early stage giardia, although at the time I didn't know exactly what disease I had contracted.

Besides the headaches, fatigue, and gastrointestinal unhappiness on my part, Thanksgiving in Pisco was rather nice. A lavish dinner, complete with two turkeys, was prepared by an extra-large dinner crew, that I would have been a member of if I wasn't lying on the couch all day. At dinner we all said, whenever we felt so moved, something we were thankful for. Afterwards was karaoke night, but I was asleep before it kicked off, though I woke up around eleven to the familiar, if very drunken, strains of 'Wagon Wheel' drifting up to the window of the Wacky Shack.

This morning, while feeling much better than I had twenty-four hours before, I was still not up for a day at the construction site, but went to the French Hospital anyway, for the first time not as a volunteer laborer, but as a patient. Whether or not a person has intestinal parasites, I learned, is determined not by a blood test, but by a poop test. A blood test thankfully determined that I did not have typhoid, and the crap test enlightened me to my giardia, and a quick trip to a pharmacist got me the pills I'll need. Altogether, the two tests plus the medication cost the equivalent of about $9.50. This is one aspect of life in Pisco I will never get tired of. I felt like it was a bit of a leap of faith though, to let a peruvian nurse stick a needle in my vein to draw some blood. The needle was pre-packaged and clearly sterilized, but still, it was a more intimate experience with the French hospital than I've had in the two weeks working there. I've walked by that bench many times, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with chunks of concrete; now I was one of the people on that bench, a wad of sterilized gauze covering the needle mark in the crook of my elbow, waiting to be told exactly how sick I was.

I had a similar experience two days ago, the day before Thanksgiving. Work was wrapping up at the hospital when Sam, one of the long time members of PSF, stopped by with the truck and said he needed a hand lifting some wood. I was pretty much done anyway, and it sounded like a quick job. As it turned out, we were getting the wood for a guy named Freddy, a local man who has helped PSF more than once, and wants to reinforce the flimsy front wall of his modular home, since someone has tried to break in a number of times. After picking up Freddy and meeting his family, along with their dog, Blanco, we went to a school surrounded, as are many establishments around here, by a concrete wall. The school, still under construction, had a lot of scarp wood lying around, and while they wouldn't give it to Freddy, they would some to PSF. So Sam, Freddy, and I loaded up the truck, and as we were pulling out, Sam spotted two other local friends of his, a sixteen year old girl and her three year old brother, trying to catch a cab, so offered them a lift home, since they live less than a block from PSF.

After we dropped of Freddy and the wood, the brother and sister rode in front with Sam while I rode in the truck bed. The little boy has a brain tumor, and the entire family is working to earn enough money to pay for the operation, with occasional help from PSF. As we were riding back I thought about how inadequate it was that all I could offer them at the moment was my seat in the front of the truck. But it was a start, I thought. That hour or so working with Freddy changed my view on the work we're doing here. There was more of an immediately tangible benefit to it, than to all the work I've done so far at the hospital, but more importantly, I feel like I got my first real sense of the people here. Up until now the people of Pisco have, by and large, just been been faces to me, no real sense of the people themselves, of who they are. I got just a glimpse of it with Freddy, and with the brother and sister, but it reminded me that what we are here to do is actually important, that this place is more than a place for twenty-somethings from Europe or the U.S. to spend a few weeks while they're backpacking around South America. I'm glad I got that reminder, it made me that much happier to be here.

I'm sitting, as usual, at one of the picnic tables in the courtyard, writing. I finished Serpico earlier this evening. Having read it, I definitely don't want to be a New York City police officer, but I wish that all cops, everywhere, could be like him. After I finish writing this, I think I'll start A Farewell to Arms. I'll try to finish it by Christmas. Speaking of which I have a (temporary) return date set. I'll be flying back to the states, by an involved route, on December 18th. I hadn't planned it when I first came down here, but this year, as Kim Gannon wrote, I'll be home for Christmas, and I'm happy for that.

For now though, sitting in the warm night here in Pisco, complete with the unwelcome parasite in my intestines, I'm glad to be here. I think maybe tomorrow I'll feel better enough to actually go out and work again. Here's hoping.