Continuing Education

The English class at the Santa Vera Cruz hospice is challenging for me to teach because the students do not always attend.  The class is small--usually only 5 at most--so any absences alter the interaction and also make the overall progression uneven. This is just one of the realities to be accepted. Sometimes students must be away in order to visit the hospital for testing. This is the case with the AIDS patients.¹ Sometimes their level of pain makes it hard for them, and admittedly unrealistic, to focus on communication through any  language other than their own wincing.² Sometimes their medications make it hard for them to focus, so the effectiveness of my own teaching efforts is relative to the challenges of the moment,³ which include my own limitations. When I consider all of these potential obstacles I am happy when I can just walk in and teach the class.

However, circumstances sometimes arise when I'm glad that a student does not attend. This was the case last week when R2⁴ was not there when I arrived at the hospice to discuss the film War Horse. When I did not see him in class I presumed that he either was too ill to attend (he has told me that his doctors estimate his time to live as less than a year) or that he was at the hospital for tests. Neither was the case, which I found out when I had left the property and met him as two of the staff were returning with him to the hospice.  Despite his condition, he wanted to add his name and voice to the protest of the discapacitados (handicapped), a group that feels its members are not receiving fair consideration by the Bolivian government.

I thought about this as I went back down the road toward the intersection where I would enter the main highway north toward Cochabamba to return home. I was impressed that R2 wanted to join with other political activists and defend the right of the discapacitados to adequate care and acceptance by mainstream society. It was good to see him lean partway out of the car window and wave to flag me down.

As I approached the intersection, passing from the dirt road to the road paved with rocks, I saw the disassembled sections of several carnival rides--a ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, and a spinning cup and saucer ride.  These rides were not made of a very heavy-gauge metal, nor were they newly painted.  They obviously had been assembled and disassembled many times as part of a traveling carnival. The rides had been disassembled this time after the completion of the celebration at Santa Vera Cruz in the past week to pray for health and increase for everything from livestock and crops to families and personal health.  This was a celebration rooted in traditions predating the arrival of the Spanish a few centuries back. Three children from the barrio were laughing as they strained to turn the base of the merry-go-round for just one more ride.

In a moment I was passing through carnival memories from my own childhood and from the childhoods of Emer and Norbert. It was hard to think of how many things had changed since the passing of all of the events that formed those memories, and it did seem ludicrous to think that the children might actually make the merry-go-round spin just by their own effort, but who could blame them for wanting to make it go just one more time?

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¹ The regularity of this may have been strained by the current conflict between the Bolivian government and the country's doctors and healthcare workers. The doctors and other healthcare workers, as well as those supporting them, such as the country's university students, have been protesting the government's efforts to ensure that the doctors provide an 8-hour-day's worth of their services to the public, this in addition to their hours of teaching as well as meeting the requirements of their own private clinics. I had a personal taste of the conflict last week when, attempting to pass through blockade lines across the highway to the men's prison to the east, I was first engulfed by a throng of fleeing students and then, after glimpsing a line of shield-and-truncheon-armed police advancing double time and shoulder to shoulder toward me, by a wave of tear gas that left me and most of the students gasping, wincing, and retreating to the side streets for untainted air. I suppose I had been taken in by the frequency with which I have been allowed to cross these barricades in the past and by my ludicrous confidence that the new ordinance requiring all blockades to be opened by 1 pm (my prison class meets at 2 pm) would be cheerfully and punctually honored by all protesting groups.
² At those times it always seems remarkable that they might be in class at all.
³ Of course, there are occasional unexpected challenges such as my arriving early only to find that E, the gatekeeper, is away and so I cannot enter to begin the class. Like many buildings here in Bolivia the hospice is enclosed within a wall that extends around the entire property, and the acreage of the property places the hospice beyond my shouting range. I do not have a telephone number to call the administrators of the hospice, the Calcutta Sisters, so when the gatekeeper is away my best option is to travel the quarter mile or so to the lower gate where usually someone within will hear when I press the door buzzer and will let me in. This is made more difficult in any season because the road to the lower gate is unpaved.  In the dry season the dirt turns to loose reddish dust about a half of a foot deep, especially challenging for me to navigate on foot because of the steep hill and the fact that my knees keep me from responding quickly if I stumble.  The same hazards exist in the rainy season but with the additional difficulty of having to progress cautiously even though each step adds more mud to the increasing weight of each shoe.  In the wet season it really is best if E is at the front gate.
⁴No, his last name is not D2. I refer to him as R2 (and I use that only to write about him here) because I have four students whose first names sound very similar to me, all begin with the letter R, and because R2 was the second R to join the class. Thus, R2.