Christmas itself and the following days provided little excitement. The internet went out for patches of Christmas, followed by the entire day of the 27th, and most of the 28th leaving me with nothing but time for Hemingwayan ruminations, reading, writing, and snorkeling. I was also given a few jobs by the team to help me pass the time. In the mornings I would check the power bank on the batteries for the solar panels, if the levels dipped too low we’d have to turn on the diesel generator. There were also two massive drums filled with beets, dried and chopped, to be sorted into bags—Many of the medical functions of Floating Doctors had ceased during the pandemic, with little foreign staff to do most of the heavy lifting, so the largest bulk of their function during 2020 had been in delivering food supplies and addressing malnutrition throughout the islands. In the pharmacy on base I found enough vitamin A enriched rice, sugar, and foods to fill a swimming pool. The beets were a newer initiative to increase vegetable consumption; every patient was given a baggy and advised to boil them with their usual rice at dinner. I was charged with the noble task of moving them from drum to sandwich bags, which turned out to be a strangely pleasant and cathartic experience. Who knew?—There was also the task of reorganising the pharmacy, which had been out of commission since May, and had been emptied of its contents into the bunkhouse in an attempt to bring more order, only for things to get so out of hand that reorganization was essentially abandoned until mobile clinics where up and running again, enter me:
During normal operations, FD’s main body of work involved mobile general medicine ‘clinics’. A usual workweek involved a separate clinic for every day of the week, servicing a different community. This meant that on a given day, all the devices and medicines necessary for a medical clinic in x community had to be loaded into the boats and brought on site with staff. At the site, everything was unloaded, a clinic set-up using whatever public area was available, and patients would line up and wait to be seen. Mobile clinics were Tuesday through Thursday, and on Friday, a skeleton team of personnel would go back to the communities to see any patients that required urgent follow up that same week. Otherwise, the team would go up to three months before visiting the same community twice, and the cycle would begin again. This allowed the team to essentially provide general practise services for chronic disease management, as well as medical OPD at the same time with pseudo-monthly visits. Some mobile clinics (to my understanding) were in communities so difficult to access that they required overnight trips, complete with pack mules and multi-hour hikes to reach the destination. Essentially, my entrance signalled that mobile clinics were coming back, and so somebody had to try and make sense of the pharmacy to prep the supplies, and packed them into what they call ‘pelican bags’ specific to each clinic (all I can picture is the bird from finding nemo). This was a task I took in stride, and with my ever present grit and rock-hard work ethic, I didn’t address it until probably later than I should have, so that gave me loads of work to pass the time sans-internet.
On Boxing day Anselmo came to me with a brilliant surprise. He had gone out fishing that morning, just like he did most days, and brought me two fine looking Jureles. After I had so boastfully preached my love of fish to him, he gave them to me whole, and with excitement in his eyes he told me to cook them as I saw fit. Little did he know I have in my lifetime probably fileted a grand total of one fish at most. Although I had taken up fishing the last few summers I was in Canada, I never caught anything of substance, or when I did I had someone else to do the fileting for me. However, this was nothing a little Youtube couldn’t fix, and although not by any means professional quality I salvaged some great eating. After lunch I went down to his quarters and thank him for the catch
‘Did you like them?’ He asked with excitement in his face.
‘I loved them. Delicious, and easy to cook, I made them on the stovetop’ I answered.
‘I will go out again tomorrow and see if I can bring you some more.’ He said
‘Amazing, but please, if you only catch a few, keep them to yourself, I will only take the extra you can’t eat. Also, when I am out of isolation I would love to join you when you go out’ I said in return, and his eyes lit up.
‘But of course!’
’Fantastic, I appreciate it and look forward to it’ I said.
‘Thank you thank you!’ He called out. I was trying for the life of me to understand why he was thanking me for him bringing me fresh fish. It made me just imagine what these last months had been for him alone on the base. Just as I was turning to leave, I noticed that he was burning something in front of the porch of his quarters, it was a smokey fire, that wafted across the base. I had smelt it before but never put it together, that fire had been burning for days. When I asked him about it he laughed.
‘This?’ He said. ‘This fire is for the chitras, it helps keep them away’
On another morning, deep into my quarantine, I was out on the docks reading, looking out into the water, when Anselmo snuck up on me.
‘Weather today looks like the same as yesterday’ He said.
‘You think?’ I asked. It was cloudy, and rained like hell overnight, the day before it didn’t rain with pockets of sun.
‘Lots of wind today like yesterday’ He said. ‘You see the clouds there in the distance?’
I nodded
‘You see how the form stripes, rayas, against the sky, one after the other? That is wind. There is a lot of wind coming.’ He said, like a teacher to a student. By golly he was right, and wind swept up the island for the rest of the day.
I love hearing things like that, it brings me a child-like joy. It makes me believe that there are still things about this world that in the West we can’t unlock. My neighbor back in Dublin was a meteorologist, I wonder what she’d have to say about that? A good friend of mine and I have this conversation all the time, about those things about life that we just can’t seem to grasp as developed societies no matter how hard we try. There is a tree of knowledge, undoubtedly, that as we learn more and more about the atoms and the science of our world distances itself from us with every development. I think about anxiety, suicide, broken families, and the misery that permeates so many people’s souls where I come from. How many people wake genuinely unhappy and unfulfilled. I just wonder if you were to survey the people of these islands and compare the data, they might live less, they might publish less papers or make less waves in their field of interest, but I wonder if they feel more fulfilled. There is a part of me that wishes that they do, and I’m not sure why.
I often ask myself how our interventions as humanitarians impacts the indigenous. I remember when I was in Africa, that same village that I spoke about earlier, in the Masai Mara. I remember the guide telling us about how the state had given them a water pump installed in the centre of their village. I thought to myself, isn’t that great, a step in the right direction, less cholera, and waterborne disease. He spoke with sadness in his eyes. ‘My people’ He said ‘We are nomads. We live to chase the wildebeests. This pump, it anchors us here. Now we no longer live as nomads. We no longer chase the herd’ Less waterborne disease I’m sure. We think we’re doing them a favour, probably some of them would agree, but something about hearing him speak just made me think: Isn’t that a shame.
Anselmo told me loads more about the base, how it was constructed and how he came to find his place as its keeper. He spoke with pride about its construction, the labour. ‘At one time there was thirty men working on common building, that was the first one built before the bunkhouse, followed by the staff casitas. At full operations the place is crawling. The dock was three times as big, and people would come with their boats all hours of the day to see the doctors. Patients came from everywhere, all the neighboring islands, worried with their sick. For this very reason, when most of the staff left on mobile clinic, 2 or 3 doctors would always stay behind. Imagine Rafaela in the kitchen commanding her troops with 75 mouths to feed every single day! And the doctors, the volunteers hailed from all over, lots of Dutch. We had many great doctors. This one doctor, a Cuban, was a fantastic doctor. He did operations, surgeries right here on the base. People came in with big huge things on their faces, and he would cut them out. Right here. He didn’t want to leave. They never want to leave. On this very dock I tell you, people stand here and cry. I would come out here and cry with them. Always saying they don’t want to leave. You have to come back when things are normal. You must.’
‘Oh Anselmo’ I said. ‘I’l be back before you know it.’
