A few days later, the clinic happened to be slow, and Mo was coming in for his first talk therapy session. I asked Shiri if I could sit in, and she discussed it first with Mo, who welcomed my presence. So, I sat in with Shiri, Mahmoud (interpreter), and Mo, just to listen.

‘So,’ Shiri started. ‘Thanks for coming in today. I just want to start by getting to know you. Tell me a little about where you grew up.’

Shifting his feet, Mo began. ‘I grew up in northern Syria. My childhood was very nice. I played a lot. We don’t have a big family but I had cousins and some aunts and uncles to help out with. I liked to play sports. Always playing and laughing.’

‘That’s nice,’ Shiri said. ‘What about school, did you like school?’

‘School was fine,’ he said with a smile. ‘I was more interested in playing than paying much attention in school. I liked to make people laugh and make them happy.’

‘I can see that,’ Shiri said.

‘This is always how I have tried to deal with things,’ he went on. ‘Even when the war started. I wanted to help my family and I would work in the shops, doing odd jobs. I stopped going to school to help out and did many things. I was good at them.’

‘You strike me that way,’ Shiri said. ‘Did you have many friends, many things to do?’

‘I did. I have always been lucky to have friends. My cousin and I were very close, we were the same age and grew up together. We were like brothers.’

‘Your cousin?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He was my best friend. When I was 15 he died from a Kurdish bombing in the town where I lived.’

The density of his words hung in the air for a moment.

‘That must have been awful Mo,’ Shiri said. ‘I am so sorry.’

‘Thank you. Of course don’t get me wrong, I am here now, I am safe. I was able to leave. Others were not so lucky and I realize that I am. I don’t like to dwell on the sadness. When it happened, we were out on the street together. I watched it. He was across the road from me when the bombs went off. I ran to save him but I couldn’t. He died in my arms.’

Fuck, I thought to myself.

The details of the ensuing conversation will remain hidden. In part because my memory cannot honour the details and in part to respect the sanctity of Shiri’s methods. 

I thought about Mo and his cousin for a while after. I thought of my own brother Carlitos. I thought of the kind of person I would be today if he had died in my arms at age 15 in a bombing. I thought of how he might be now if I were the one who died in his. Where would all that pain go? My brother and I are very different. I think he might get angry. I think I might get sad. What I do know is that a trauma like that would mark either of us for the rest of our lives, and no matter how much time passed or what other beautiful things life brought, there would always remain a hole, a wound that left a scar even if someday healed. Mo carried his scar somewhere so deep inside that it fought its way out of him uncontrollably at times unexpected. That was the one story I really got to hear firsthand. This visit proved to be one of my most memorable in Lesvos because I actually got to hear his story.

This was one of my subtle disappointments of my clinical time in Lesvos. What I really wanted, more than treating runny noses or prescribing inhalers, was to hear people’s stories. I wanted to listen, bear witness, and come face to face with the lives behind the headlines people throw around the internet when touting their political opinions. I wanted to humanize the numbers. In truth however, that was not my job here. I was here to provide medical care, and imposing my curiosities during a patient visit would only work against the main focus of my role. As a matter of fact, we were encouraged not to ask direct questions about people’s stories unless they offered them unprompted. Why unearth trauma that doesn’t need to be unearthed in a 15 minute consultation for the flu? 

When the stories did come through, I realized that people weren’t interested in talking about all the shit they went through. What they preferred to talk about instead was how beautiful their homes were. How they found success selling phones and bought a house with a pool before the Israeli offensive in Gaza turned it to dust. How their women were fighters. How the flowers bloomed in the summertime where they grew up. How delicious the Afghan cooking was and how the mountains glowed in the morning. These were ordinary people who loved their culture, not hated it. They love Palestine and Afghanistan and Syria and Yemen and Sierra Leone as much as Italians love pasta and Brazilians love dancing. Those places they love have now been either blown to shit by forces outside their control or expelled them because of their ethnicity, faith, or tribe.

So they come to Europe. Why? Because everywhere else they are treated subhuman. Neighboring countries offer them no chance to truly integrate. They can’t get social insurance. They can’t work. They can’t access healthcare or education. Who deserves to live like that? 

I recognize that this world is unfair. I did my first degree in evolutionary sciences, the world has and will forever be deliberately unfair to weed out the weak and propagate survival of the fittest. Animals suffer and starve to death in the wild all the time. We’re animals all the same; none of that is lost on me. It’s a bitter truth of existence that is undeniable, and I don’t pretend that this truth will ever change, nor do I believe it should. It’s a law of the universe, and the universe is beautiful with the bad and the good. I do however, believe that we are capable of treating each other with more decency, and that there are larger forces at play attuned to an agenda that sails more smoothly when its obstacles are dehumanized.

I came to Greece as a foot soldier, one doctor with one patient at a time, not because I thought that would change anything, but because I thought I should bear witness to this; if I achieved anything in Lesvos, maybe it’s that. Even though the medicine itself was less than my usual excitement, my time with the Boat Refugee Foundation in Greece was important, and formative. I learned a lot about the mechanisms of humanitarian health, the UN, the EU, and the larger aid-sector in a way that I haven’t with many NGOs I worked with before. Taking a step back from development and just participating in aid also gave me another lens through which to understand this space; there are still millions of people on the move, drifting alone through the world, just looking for a place to call their home.

In a way, my mind calls back to a pivotal scene from the Motorcycle Diaries, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s firsthand account of bearing witness to the poverty and exploitation of his continent. There is a moment where he and his Cordobese travel partner make camp in Chile with a miner and his wife. The couple is traveling to escape from their immense poverty, leaving children behind to find work in the copper mines.

‘Are you two looking for work?’ the miner’s wife asks them.

‘No, we aren’t,’ they answer.

‘Oh,’ she says. Her eyebrows furrow. ‘Then why are you traveling?’

The question hangs thickly in the air.

‘We travel just to travel,’ El Che says.

‘Bless you and your travels,’ she responds.

Rewatching that film on a plane between one place and another this year made it all the more resonant. Like Che, my objective here has been to understand the world I want to help. The journey has been a true roller coaster in every sense, passing me through every emotion in all their strife and glory. There is a privilege in that which I will never take for granted.

Someone asked me a question the other day that was hard to answer. It was an old friend I reconnected with on whatsapp. We spoke about my whirlwind life in the few years since we’d last caught up.

‘Are you happy?’ she asked.

I had to think about it. Which probably tells you the answer.

‘I am happy with my life,’ I said. ‘Maybe just not happy all the time right now. I am still in a period of metamorphosis that has to bring ups as well as downs. That’s the beauty in life.’

So the real question is: what happens now?

Well, I am broke. Turns out a year of volunteering and struggling to break in to paying gigs in the nonprofit space is taxing. Who knew.

Also, if I am being honest, I miss having a home. I miss having my community. It’s funny, I have written about community so extensively before in this blog as the root of all meaning, and yet here I gave up mine jumping into the abyss and finding myself surprised to miss it so quickly. These realizations feel stupid to me now, almost like a given. How could I have ever thought that living out of a backpack would ever fill my soul the same way? Truth is, I never really knew if it would, I just knew I had to try it. Like so many of us, I put on a confident face and tell the world I know what I’m doing when really I’m winging life as it goes. These are lessons that we all learn in different ways. This has been my journey to get there.

All that being true, this year in the field has been the most glorious period of growth I’ve ever been through, and we’re just getting started. I just need to tweak the formula a bit to include a home and money. Good thing I know just the place…

So, Pennsylvania Hospital, my dearest, I am coming back to you. The place in Philadelphia where I left a part of myself will make a good home for now as I plot the next move. Visa headaches and contract negotiations aside, I signed a deal to work half-time on the medicine faculty, 6-8 months a year, leaving the rest to go back into the field. In the meantime I’ll try to get in with the global health division at university and facilitate projects for other keen medics. This will be my setup for two years.

On my way back to the US from Greece, I stopped to visit my cousin Nacho in Tuscany. He was recently moved there by work into the foothills outside Volterra, some 90 minutes from Florence. I spent a week in his country home with his two young daughters, one five and one six months old. Nacho is in his forties now and life moves at a different speed, but there was a time when he was just like me, getting moved by big oil all over the world. I spent my time eating pasta, playing with dolls, and making paper masks with a five-year-old while coddling a baby. It was great, but one week was more than enough. My time for the suburbs will come someday, just not yet. I want a home and sustainability, yes, but that doesn’t mean I am looking to slow down. 

So, in some ways the vagabond chapter closes, and that’s okay. I had to live it. Another chapter now awaits. Part time Assistant Professor of Medicine, part time jungle runner.

‘Like Indiana Jones,’ Nacho said to me.

‘Fuck yeah,’ I said. ‘Like Indiana Jones.’

Until next time,

Pez