It took me six months to get to Vietnam, only to find it doing quite well. I decided to try the Philippines and found a beautiful community working with the Aeta people around Mount Pinatubo. It was there that I learned that Ricardo had hitchhiked across Mexico and found his way to my family home in Michigan for Thanksgiving Dinner. He told the story of how he had just crossed the Rio Grande and was looking for a public telephone. He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was a border guard who asked him what he was doing. He remembered what I had told him and responded in English: “I am looking for a pay phone, sir.” The guard gave him a card and let him go. That card had a date on it, and when victims of Hurricane Mitch were granted green cards, they had to provide proof of their arrival in the country. He presented the card and was given a green card. Many other children from Yocón have left the village and now live outside of Honduras, and are doing well.
Though I enjoyed my time in the Philippines, I felt compelled to return to Vietnam. I flew to Hanoi, but nothing came of it. Frustrated, I told a missionary there, who suggested Cambodia. Although I had heard the country was unstable, he said his brother was there and assured me it would be fine. When I landed in Phnom Penh, I sensed I was exactly where I needed to be.
The clinic on the road to La Union was never just a place of medicine. It was a window into a world where survival and sacrifice were not abstract concepts but daily calculations. A father chose six living children over one dying son. A grandmother’s love carried a child across a flooded river, only for that same love to become the source of an unbearable grief. Men drank themselves to the edge of death for sport, and a young girl came back from the brink of death, as someone none of us recognized.
I arrived in Yocón with some medical training and, I now realize, a good deal of arrogance about how the world works and what it owes to reason. The clinic slowly dismantled both. Christina kept me honest when my instincts failed me, and the patients kept me humble when my judgment failed. What I could offer was often not enough, and what I thought I understood about people — their choices, their values, their relationship to life and death — was regularly turned on its head.
Some of those I treated lived. Some died. A few lived in ways that made me question whether I had done them a kindness. I carried each of them with me when I left, and I carry them still.
THE END