Open for Business

Monday, June 16

"Este es el día!" we sang at devotions this morning, Ruth Castro's voice leading us with her characteristic enthusiasm. "This is the Day!" And it is.

When we arrive at the elementary-school-turned-clinic, scores of town residents are lined up outside the gate. A few dozen -- the earliest arrivals -- are already on the clinic grounds, queued under the trees, awaiting us. We are open for business.

The maintenance team makes space for me in their storeroom/workroom, which is the school principal's office. I open my backpack, take out my camera, attach the flash unit, check all the battery levels. I'm ready to go. I start my rounds under the canopy outside the dentistry building, where people are lined up for prescreening, weighing, blood pressure testing, parasite medicine, vitamins, and referrals to the appropriate clinic. I visit Tomás's health and Christian education class. I stop by the pharmacy and the physical therapy clinic. Not much is happening yet in the lab or the pediatrics and adult medicine clinics, so I go to where I know there's already a crowd -- dentistry.

I came to Honduras prepared to photograph tooth extractions, abscess lancings, eye infections, parasitic infestations, and interesting faces. What I am unprepared for is the emotional wallop.

Many of the hackneyed phrases one hears about the people CURE International serves in this region are generally true. They are a beautiful people, the children especially. The faces of the elderly are etched with a character one sees rarely in the States, character built upon endurance, acceptance and faith. Their lives are unrelentingly hard. Most know only physical labor all their lives, well into their sixties and even longer, and never escape a poverty that makes most of the poorest North Americans seem solidly middle class. Some cannot afford even the token fee (about the equivalent of a US dollar) that CURE asks but, of course, does not insist on.

Despite all this, these people glow with a deep pride that is very moving. They want the help that CURE offers -- they know that they and their families need it -- and they are genuinely grateful. Yet they are not begging. If they could pay with money, they would. But they have only their smiles and their words of thanks, and so they pay that way, generously.

But the wallop comes from elsewhere.

I am moving from dental chair to dental chair, photographing hygiene treatments, restorations, tooth extractions, and taking candid portraits of the doctors and their assistants, when a bloodcurdling shriek brings everything and everyone to a momentary halt. A young boy, maybe six or seven years old, is in an oral surgery chair at the end of the line. Four people are trying to hold him still as a surgeon works to extract two rotted teeth. The child is terrified, able to scream and scream, it seems, without taking a breath between. He struggles against the adult hands. His mother stands near, helpless and scared yet trying to be stoic, tears streaming down her cheeks.

It is a scene of pure fear, and suddenly tears are welling up in me, and I have to flee the room. I take refuge in the dental triage room next door, where Bill Waring and teenager Leah Knowlton are at work, assessing each patient's problems and specifying treatments. They ask me if I am okay, and I tell them what I'm feeling. Bill smiles. He's seen it before among newcomers, the sudden, overwhelming emotional impact of it all. He knows the feeling himself.

I take a few minutes to regain my composure, then return to the dental clinic. The young boy is still in the chair. His ordeal is over, but his lips, puffed out around the gauze in his mouth, are still quivering. His mother is comforting him.

I don't know what prompts me, but I suddenly ask them in my freshly minted Spanish if I may take their photo. They stare at me blankly, not sure what to answer. I take the photo anyway and quickly show them the results on the digital camera's viewer. It seems to take them a moment to realize that they are seeing themselves. The boy's face calms. The mother smiles faintly. And in that moment I realize that the one thing I can contribute to these people is to distract them for a moment or two from their pain and fear.

The simple fact is that many of them have never seen a dentist or physician or surgeon before. The equipment, the steel instruments, the noise, the masked foreigners in their scrubs, with headlamps on their foreheads and syringes in their hands, most of whom speak little or no Spanish, must certainly be very strange to them. I can only imagine the courage and faith it takes for them to come here and put their trust in us.

Several times during this first day, I feel that same welling up inside, but each time it is a little less, and by day's end I can hear shrieks and see tears without much flinching. More important, as I wander around from clinic to clinic and among the crowds waiting outside, I watch for flickers of fear and apprehension. When I see one I stop, smile, and raise my camera. "Me gustaria sacar su photo," I say. "?Puedo?"

It is all I can do.