It hasn’t
been so long since my last update, but I wanted to share a few things:
After six months of house-hopping in California and three months of travelling, I am a migrant no longer. I just moved into my first ever home of my own, a two-bedroom duplex just behind the Health Center where I will be working on the Hopi Reservation in Northern Arizona. The home is truly beautiful, and the housing complex, like the Health
Center and everything else around here, is surrounded by a breathtaking expanse
of desert, mesas, and sky that extend in every direction as far as the eye can
see. Every time I step outside my door or look out my window, I feel so
grateful to be alive and present in this extraordinary place. I don’t start
work until October 3rd, and I have enjoyed being able to take my
time driving around trying to find all the utilities and offices and stores
that I will need for life around here in a place where there are no addresses,
few street signs, and everything is in a trailer that often has no sign in
front of it to identify it as the Water Office, for example.
 |
| My home with a beautiful tree giving great shade |
 |
| The dirt road behind the complex where I went running this morning |
The other
thing to share is that I was finally able to go back and visit Santa Ana,
Ecuador, the community where I have been doing water work for the last 10 years
although had not visited since 2012. There is now a paved road, a health
center, and an “infocenter” which is like a public internet cafe with
incredibly slow internet. The community water system still isn’t working, but
most families still have the rainwater systems eight or nine or ten years
later, which is remarkable. And many families actually asked me for chlorine
dropper bottles for water treatment, in contrast to the summer I first went
when no one wanted any kind of “chemical” in their water.
 |
| Rainwater tanks on the large covered community area in Santa Ana |
With all this
‘development’, the people are still very passionate about preserving their
natural environment, maintaining their language and culture, and working to
provide an education and opportunities for their children. It has been
fascinating to witness the progression of one community’s effort through all the
challenges, contradictions, and complexity, to enact that mythological entity
of ‘sustainable development’. In Santa Clotilde, Peru, I was told that many
patients had come to the hospital since I left asking for tests for parasites
because they heard the water was contaminated, and I helped the environmental
health office prepare a grant proposal to install a treatment system at the
hospital.
It was
gratifying to feel that even after prioritizing medical education over these
water projects for so long, that my work over the years has had some positive
impacts and that I continue to have a very close connection to these places and
the people that mean so much to me as they grow and change. And man do they
change. For example, I met Sacha as a 7-year old in the family I lived in the
first summer in Santa Ana, at which time she was frequently helping to look
after her younger 2 year old twin sisters as well as guide me around the
community. Now Sacha is 17 and was elected the “Nusta Warmi” or “Princess” of her
community, which means that she is supposed to work with her community’s local
government to raise money and provide support for children in Santa Ana. I’ve
made a gofundme page to try to help her raise money for school supplies for the
primary school children. If you would like to make a donation, she and I would
be very grateful: www.gofundme.com/santaana
 |
| Sacha with her "Nusta Warmi" sash |
