Freedom

Today was the day. I've seen the yearning in Mowgli to go explore the outdoors. And not just to walk around on a leash, but to have FREEDOM. So today was the day. I went out to clean my car and when Mowgli bolted for the door like usual, instead of pushing him back into the safe comforts of home, on a moment of impulse I let him run out. I've been scared of him not coming back, scared that there are too many big dogs around, scared that he doesn't recognize the dangers out there. But fears cripple the chance for living life fully and abundantly. Things might happen but it's time to let him go. I watched him tentatively walk around sniffing bushes until that last moment where I saw him disappear around the corner of the house. The moment of letting go...

God lets us go every day. We head out into the world, free to make our own decisions and go down whatever path we choose. And I'm sure there is a part of Him that stands there at the doorway, hoping that we will remember the things that He taught us, hoping that when things get rough we'll find the way back to Him. And for me, especially right now, I hope and pray earnestly that he will make that path clear to me and block off the others.

I'm feeling terrible—I couldn't feel worse! Get me on my feet again. You promised, remember? When I told my story, you responded; train me well in your deep wisdom. Help me understand these things inside and out so I can ponder your miracle-wonders. My sad life's dilapidated, a falling-down barn; build me up again by your Word. Barricade the road that goes Nowhere; grace me with your clear revelation. I choose the true road to Somewhere, I post your road signs at every curve and corner. I grasp and cling to whatever you tell me; God, don't let me down! I'll run the course you lay out for me if you'll just show me how. - Psalm 119:25-32 (Message)

After an hour of trying to keep myself from worrying every time I heard dogs bark....I walked outside for the millionth time and saw Mowgli at a neighbor's door trying to scratch his way in. When I called him, he came bounding over to the right door and rubbed his cobweb-covered face all over me, little heart beating excitedly. He came back! But he is already meowing at the door again, unable to forget the exciting freedom outdoors so I think this will turn into a daily occurrence of trust :)

Made To Love

Love.

Why do we love? I have been realizing over the last few days that I love because I want love back. I give because I want. Not just to give.

When I was visiting Loma Linda a couple weeks ago, the sermon I listened to at the University Church was about achieving perfection. What the pastor had to say really stuck with me. Matthew 5:48 says, "Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly father is perfect." So what does it mean to be perfect? Most of the time I think I fall into thinking it means sinless perfection. I often make lists of things I need to get done in the next few days. Lists of things to achieve. Lists of ways to make the most of my time. Thinking I should work at being better. And then I feel like a failure when I don't complete that list, or sometimes don't even finish one thing because I spend my time in a different way once the moment is there.

The path of sinless perfection leads to one of two results. Despair or pride. Despair that we will never reach it and always fall short. Or pride that we are becoming so good and giving such a great appearance of what a perfect life should be.

In his sermon, Randy Roberts brought up that the real definition of perfection isn't to be sinless, it is to fulfill the purpose of what we were made to be and do. So what is our purpose? Why did God make us and what purpose did he give us? He made us to LOVE. To be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect is to love like he loves. To love with no strings attached.

I've had a lot of people tell me over the last few weeks that this is my time to take care of myself and I've had a hard time deciding what that should look like. It's been easy to define taking care of myself as being careful. Being careful not to be hurt, being careful not to put anything out there that might get stomped on by the world. But I don't think that's what it should be. I feel like God hasn't created us to be careful and keep a safe shell around us. He created us with the ability to get out there and take risks with him by our side. And I am seeing how I want to be careful with my love. I don't want to love people if they don't give me love back. But God calls us to love like him, with nothing attached. So that is what I want to do right now. Learn to give without trying to get something out of it for myself. Without being filled with wanting my own hopes fulfilled.

Just because He made me to love.

Not Me

I feel like a novice trying to figure my way through this break-up. I'd never broken up with anyone before. And that would be because I never dated anyone before this relationship. I guess there's a first time for everything. But it seems like there is almost a protocol to breaking up that many people want to share with me. Do this...don't do that. I feel stressed trying to decide what path I should be taking through this.

And the hardest realization I've had over the last few days is the feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It is so ironic. My boyfriend wanted to break up because he wasn't who he wanted to be anymore and felt like our relationship contributed to that. And now the break-up has made me into who I don't want to be. It once again feels so unfair that I seem to keep drawing the short straw of not getting what I wish or want. I know that is probably a selfish way to look at things. But I don't have the heart to even judge myself right now.

I no longer cook. This year I have had so much fun and joy in cooking, finding new recipes, experimenting. But it's so different not having someone to cook for. The joy is no longer there trying to make something just for myself. And it just brings up too many wonderful memories that are painful to remember.

And so the little that I do eat isn't even food I usually choose to eat. I'm eating stuff that makes me sick or that has no nutritional value at all. I'll buy produce and food at the grocery story with meals in mind, but once I get home I never want to make it. Food is sitting in my fridge and going bad. And that isn't me either. I don't waste food.

My kitchen can be a mess and I don't care. I have no motivation to clean pots or even to put away a cutting board after using it. I'm usually very obsessive-compulsive about my kitchen, having to clean everything immediately after using it and wiping all the counters clean from any little crumb. Now things just sit there, a constant reminder of my lack of motivation every time I walk by.

I hate the time alone with my thoughts so much that I try to drown it with anything that will occupy it. One evening last week I kept watching Greys Anatomy episodes...one after another. I would finish one and decide that I was still too awake and alert, so I'd start another. Over and over until I was exhausted enough to fall immediately asleep. I never used to sit and just watch TV, and I almost never kept up with any popular tv show. It's not me. I was the one who would just shrug when conversations came up about them.

I don't want to go do things outside. Even typing that sentence seems shocking. The outdoors has been my comfort zone for my entire life. Now I look outside at the sunny day and it just seems too happy to walk out and taint it with my sad feelings. That's not me. I love being outside.

As the work day ended this evening and my coworkers exchanged what they were looking forward to once they got home, the only thing I could come up with was, "I get to go home to my cat." Then I fought tears all the way home thinking about how pitiful it was that I'm just going home to my cat. And how much I deeply miss going home to someone, getting to talk through my day with someone special to me. And it is definitely not me to not want to be with my cat and to see my time with Mowgli as depressing.

I'm not me right now.

I've had really difficult experiences in the past. Really hard things. And some people tell me that I'm prone to these difficult things happening to me somehow. I've always believed in the verse where it says God won't give us more than we can bear, and I've always been able to bear it. But this feels like the limit. I want to plead with God, "no this one is too much. You mis-calculated this time! I wonder if I will ever not feel this physical pain, just smothering my chest every time I think about what has happened and how much I miss him.

But I do know that God hasn't changed from the God that brought me up and out of all those other hard experiences. I was maybe able to see the light in those experiences better than this one. But He's still the same God. And even if I'm completely blind with no light right now, He will still lead me out. That is what I'm trusting in. Even if I don't feel it. Because the same God who was with me then, is with me now. And the same God who led me in, will lead me out.

And maybe it's okay that I'm not me right now because ultimately I don't want to be me, I want to become Him. If I wasn't changing from the person I was a year ago, I wouldn't be growing. We'll see where he takes me...

"There is a well-known passage right in the beginning of the Bible (Genesis 1:27): 'God created man in his own image.' I believe this to be true, and I believe that if you accept this and you want to come to a more complete understanding of what God is, you must study the brain. There is nothing I know of that God has created that is more beautiful, that is more intricate, and that gives us more insight into what God is than the human brain.
If you want to understand an artist, you study his art. I believe that if you want to understand God, you must study Nature, because Nature is God's art. It's what God has created, and the better you understand Nature, the more insight you get into God.
For me, the anatomy and biochemistry of the human brain is God's greatest art. It is quite simply the most beautiful structure in the known universe. The idea that anyone might liken it to oatmeal or Jell-O or cottage cheese, or consider it ugly, gross, or repulsive, is inconveivable to me. Whenever I look at the pathways and intricacies of the human brain, I am looking at God's art. Every time I operate on the brain, it makes me more spiritual."

- Keith Black, MD


Fascinating book. And I have felt the same rush in the middle of surgery, looking into a living breathing body and being awestruck by the beauty and intricacy of every little artery and tissue. Such a testament to our creator.

Words Finding A Home

I constantly write in my mind. I'll change phrases, delete words, refine thoughts...all just in my mind as I go throughout my day. So I've written a million blogs, just not typed them out. But I'm at a point where I keep thinking the same thoughts over and over and over in my mind. And it feels like this blog I'm writing is never going to be at peace until the words find a permanent home. So it's time to type.

My boyfriend broke up with me two weeks ago.

Just typing those words out is still hard. And I know that people who didn't know my boyfriend and I together might just see that as just a regular happening in the world and think "get over it girl, it happens to all of us." People get together and break up every day. Not that earth-shattering in this world.

Well it was earth-shattering to me. I wasn't expecting it or wanting it. I had already bought an anniversary gift to give him in another week, marking our 3 years together. Yes, things hadn't gone easy over the last couple of months together, but I expected there to be times where it wasn't going to be easy. I still saw it as worth it. Worth it for all the love I felt for him. Worth it for all the values and passions we share. Worth it for the way God had brought us together in the beginning. Worth it for all the trust we had built between us and deep things we had shared with each other. I loved what we had.

Trust. That is one of the hardest parts I'm dealing with now. Broken trust. Every step in a relationship has to involve trust. I've felt like we have moved very slowly, carefully in our relationship, sharing things little by little. And each time I trusted him a little more. Growing and growing trust. It's like a rope. When I rock-climb, I have to trust the rope I'm on to hold me when I fall. But there's a difference in the size of rope and how much trust I feel. I could climb with a string attached to me, but I'm not going to take very many risks. But as the rope increases in size, I put more and more trust in it. I climb higher, throw myself at little holds, go for that seemingly unreachable cleft. Our relationship grew in trust, thicker and thicker...at least on my side. I shared things I never thought I would share. I think now how much easier it would have been if he had broken up with me sooner, before that trust grew so thick. Because as I was climbing higher and higher, putting myself out there because of the trust I felt, the rope was suddenly severed. And there's a lot further distance to fall now. I trusted him to stick with me through good and hard times. But he didn't.

The other hard part I'm dealing with is feeling like unconditional love must not be possible in this world. I trusted that when he began saying he loved me that he meant it and that meant unconditionally. And one of the main reasons he has said for breaking up with me is that he no longer loves me. I struggled with even believing that was true at first because I don't understand how a person can so suddenly stop loving another person. Going through some of my things the other day, I found my birthday card from him a month ago, expressing his deep love for me. And he told me often that he loved me, up till just a few weeks before breaking up. How does that change in just a couple weeks? Or was it not true? I don't know which is more painful -- that I suddenly became unlovable, or that he has been lying to me.

One thing I do know is that it is not so easy for me to stop loving. I wish desperately right now that I felt no love for him, because that would make it easier. But I can't help it. I was told once that I would finally understand God's unconditional love once I was in a relationship with that special person. And I felt like I was just starting to get a taste of it. We could disagree on something and it was freeing to be ok with it because I knew it didn't affect my love for him and I trusted that it didn't affect his love for me. I could mess up and trust that he would love me through it.

Oh and the JOY of being with someone you love so much! I miss that deeply now. Everything else could go wrong in a day, but I could always feel that extra hope in life because I had him with me. I counted on it. Just as I had that happiness deep inside that I could pull out when I really needed, I now have this awful feeling deep inside me instead. Sickening nausea in the pit of my stomach.

I do know that things will be ok. I will get through this, happiness will come again, and God will make something great happen because He is that capable of making goodness come from badness. But it will take time to get through the feelings of rejection, broken trust, and love that was conditional. And time to get over the deep love I still feel for him. And time to not feel so lonely in the evenings that I'm used to spending with him.

Right now I still have a God to put trust in, and that is keeping me afloat. I can look back over all that he has stuck through with me in the past and hold onto the knowledge that he keeps his promises to love no matter what and never leave. And I trust that this is going to grow me in positive ways, no matter how negative it feels right now. I don't want to grow bitter, I want to heal.


Whatever You're Doing
By Sanctus Real

It's time for healing time to move on
It's time to fix what's been broken too long
Time to make right what has been wrong
It's time to find my way to where I belong
There's a wave that's crashing over me
And all I can do is surrender

Whatever You're doing inside of me
It feels like chaos but somehow there's peace
It's hard to surrender to what I can't see
but I'm giving in to something Heavenly

Time for a milestone
Time to begin again
Reevaluate who I really am
Am I doing everything to follow Your will
Or just climbing aimlessly over these hills
So show me what it is You want from me
I give everything I surrender...
To...

Whatever You're doing inside of me
It feels like chaos but somehow there's peace
It's hard to surrender to what I can't see
but I'm giving in to something Heavenly
Something Heavenly

Time to face up
Clean this old house
Time to breathe in and let everything out
That I've wanted to say for so many years
Time to release all my held back tears

Whatever You're doing inside of me
It feels like chaos but I believe
You're up to something BIGGER than me
Larger than life something Heavenly

Whatever You're doing inside of me
It feels like chaos but now I can see
This is something bigger than me
Larger than life something Heavenly
Something Heavenly


Amen

Blood, Pus, & Speculums

As we spend time in clinics and in our global health class, I find myself more and more interested and focused on children's and women's health. The biggest rates and statistics of death and disease in developing countries are from children under the age of 5 and from maternal complications during pregnancy and delivery. In Africa I received a lot of experience in delivering babies and some complications that arise from that. Here in Nicaragua there has been less of that and more a presence of STIs, pelvic inflammatory disease, and cervical cancer - which has a very high prevalence rate in this area.

Dr. Caldera really pushes women's health and has been trying to make it more of a norm. Despite that, many women are still very shy about mentioning any symptoms or letting us do an exam on them. It is a lot different from the hospital in Africa where there was no personal space or privacy. Whole wards of people together while we did all kinds of dressing changes and most of the nurses being male. Here, even with a personal enclosed area, a blanket covering most everything and only girls assisting Dr. Caldera, it can still be hard to convince the women to let us examine them.

Dr. Caldera is one of the kindest, most understanding doctors I've ever worked with. He takes so much extra time to teach us and to let us do procedures ourselves. Because of the wariness of the women, the few of us girls have gotten a lot of experience in gynecology this semester. Vaginal exams, pregnancy check-ups, speculums galore, and even an entire clinic of just Pap smears in one village. I know that this subject is not an interest for many, but the more I see how much the women suffer from these problems and diseases, the more I want to know more on how to help them.

Our group is set up to have 2 students on call with Dr. Caldera at all times for any medical emergencies that come up, or house calls. These trips vary a lot between actual emergencies, just visiting an old woman with a cough, and transporting maybe a kid with a broken arm to the hospital in Waspam. My most recent call, I call our gynecological emergency day. David and I are partners and were called late Sunday morning to go with Dr. Caldera to see a woman that had been bleeding excessively. We walked down to the clinic first to grab a pregnancy test, a speculum, and some other meds and vitamins that might prove useful. Then we walked our way through the village in the heat to the woman. She was visiting her mother who lived in the classic one room wooden house up on stilts. The animals hang out under the house and the family cooks on the porch. This woman was visiting from the city, Managua, which was great because she could speak Spanish well and wasn't shy about explaining everything to us.

She had been spotting blood for a couple weeks and then developed significant bleeding for the last 2 days, getting really weak and dizzy. After a lot of conversation we found out that she had had many irregularities in her menstruation before and had been on some hormone medications in past years. She had quit taking them a while back when she thought she was better, and had no menstruation at all for a while. We did a pregnancy test first to rule out any chance of a spontaneous abortion or other complication with pregnancy, and that turned up negative. So Dr. Caldera had me get out the speculum we had brought and find out if she was still actively bleeding or not. There was a lot of blood and big clots that made it difficult, but I finally found the cervix and could see constant blood leaking through. With that knowledge, Dr. Caldera was stuck in indecision on whether we should be sending her to Waspam yet from too much blood loss, or do something here in the village.

We headed back to the mission and he explained how he really didn't have much experience in this kind of case. He asked me if I knew anything about what to do from a fellow women's perspective. I told him that I had friends with irregular menstruation that had started early on with birth control pills to help regulate, but that's all I knew. So we split up at the mission and agreed to meet up in 30 minutes after consulting medical books. I checked the Where There is No Doctor book first, but in the "bleeding unrelated to pregnancy" section, all it said was to see a medical provider for help right away. So then I went to my Wilderness Medicine manual and found a great little section describing treatment of taking a months worth of contraceptive pills in one week to control bleeding. We met back up and Dr. Caldera said he had come to the same conclusion, but we had none in our clinic.

A long walk to the other side of the village took us to Janet, the MINSA nurse's house. MINSA are the government-run clinics that are in most of the villages, staffed by usually one health worker or nurse. Janet said she had some pills at her clinic, so we trekked over there to get some. In the process of all this, a man had approached us on the road, wanting us to look at his wife who supposedly had a tumor. Many times people tell us they have tumors or a "ball" somewhere in their abdomen or back that they are sure they can feel. But when we check and feel around, often we find nothing and wonder about these imaginary tumors infecting so many. This sounded similar to one of those cases so Dr. Caldera kept saying, "We have an emergency right now. We can't see her. Come to the clinic in another week when we open up again." The man was very insistent, though, and Dr. Caldera finally caved saying, "Go sit at the clinic and we will look at her next time we walk by."

That next time happened when we walked by with the contraceptive pills and saw the man with his wife sitting on the steps of our clinic. So we headed in for what we thought would be a quick exam. As the husband explained once again the problem, we realized he was actually pointing to her groin, not the abdomen. So I got some sheets and took the woman into a room to change out of her clothes and lie down on one of the beds. She was very shy so I did the exam once again and found a large abscess about the size of a softball protruding from one of the outer lips of her vagina. Ouch! It looked painful. We poked it with a catheter and drained out about half a liter of white, green smelly pus. David and Dr. Caldera could hardly stand the smell, trying to keep their heads turned away, but to me it just smelled like the hospital in Bere. We drained so much pus out of people there and so many nasty infections that you eventually just get used to the smell like it is normal.

After draining the abscess, Dr. Caldera took a while to get out some sterile instruments and cut open the skin a little more to pack it full of bandage, leaving a hole to drain out of. I gave her a shot of ceftriaxone, a pack of antibiotics, and then sent her home. We grabbed our medical bags again and hiked back over to our first patient's house to give her the contraceptive pills, explain everything, tell her to check up with a doctor in Managua when she got home, and to see the MINSA nurse if she got worse while we were gone on the river trip. Then back to the mission to continue packing for our week out in Krin Krin on the river.

Later in the evening as it was getting dark, Mrs. Brown, who cooks for our group, walked up the hill with her daughter asking for Dr. Caldera. It sounded like a very similar medical case with her complaining of bleeding over the last couple of days. As we talked more, she explained that she hadn't had her period for 3 months previous before this bleeding started. Dr. Caldera turned to me and asked, "Sarah, I am so busy right now trying to pack and prepare your tests for next week. Can you take her down and examine her on your own?" I jumped at the chance and a few minutes later after grabbing my headlamp and scrub pants, David and I were walking back down to the clinic in the dark with the girl.

First up was a pregnancy test once again. This time it was positive! Good news. Mrs. Brown would be excited about another grandkid. But now the worry about the chance of a spontaneous abortion with the bleeding. David got me a speculum and I checked again to see if she was still actively bleeding. This time she wasn't. There wasn't near as much blood as the first woman and I couldn't see any coming out of the cervix. Good news once again. So after giving her instructions to lie down and rest a lot, and a bag of prenatal vitamins, we headed back to the mission. On the way we stopped by Mrs. Brown's house to tell her the news and tell her to make sure her daughter followed the instructions on resting from work if she wanted to keep the baby.

One day, three patients, all gynecological. Fun times :)

Dear Sonya, Liz, and Hans,

This is a letter to my 3 comrades from my time in Chad, Africa. I think of you often while down here in Nicaragua. My experiences with you in Bere have shaped so much of how I view things down here in Central America. I imagine how we would joke together at the many luxuries here that most see as hardships. Outhouses with real toilet seats on them! Rice and beans to eat every day (I know! Real beans! Not just some spit sauce). Real, large, metal-framed cots to sleep on at night that never collapse. Free email through the ham radio each week.

I am grateful for the examples the 3 of you gave in Africa and have incorporated a little bit from each of you into my life and work here. Every time I'm tempted to stand back and let someone translate to English for me, I think of Hans, and how despite his excellent French that he could already communicate with, he still spent time studying and learning Arabic and Nangjere to communicate even better with the level of the people. I remember his interest in the politics behind culture and understanding why people do what they do. So here I keep trying to engage myself in the culture with the Miskito people. Ask questions about why they do things. Repeat all the Miskito words that I can. Build relationships with the locals.

In clinics I am constantly reminded of Liz and all the medications and nursing procedures she took the time to teach me. Her commitment and love for patients was so apparent in the way she treated and cared for them. It has encouraged me to spend more time with my patients, touch them, talk to them, explain what I'm doing or giving them. Rushing babies to Waspam at night always makes me wish for Liz, my CPR buddy back in Africa.

And Sonya, I was always so amazed to watch her creative interactions with the people and especially the children. No matter the language barrier, she could always make them laugh. And such simple games with bottle caps, crayons, or rocks, she could make friends within minutes and entertain for hours. On the most recent clinic I suddenly found myself pushed out of my station with nothing to do for the rest of the day. Starting to get annoyed with the turn of events, I looked around and though, what would Sonya do?....Of course, she would entertain the children! So I grabbed the bag of balloons, made a crazy ridiculous balloon hat to wear that would have made Sonya proud, and proceeded to blow up millions of balloons for the kids. Remembering how she would get creative and find ways to include kids, soon James and I were blowing up balloons within balloons and adding little rocks to make them rattle. I tasked a group of boys with finding good smooth rocks and another group to be in charge of telling me whether a kid was being honest or not about receiving one already. Soon we had a real production and game going on that lasted all the way till dinner.

Oh my life is so much richer down here by remembering your examples! Thank you for that! With a bigger group down here, it is harder to have the same comraderie, deep love, and understanding that the 4 of us shared in Chad. But I get excited when the breakthrough does happen here and there. The last few days, our group has been hit by some kind of explosive diarrhea phase that makes me start singing about Giardia. A month or so ago, most looked at me with disgust or disdain as I would try to describe the fun moments of a true diarrheal episode. With the recent personal experiences had, however, we've had such great conversations already with no holding back. I know you guys would have no qualms about joining in on descriptions on what it is like to be peeing out of both holes, to have an "accident" when you thought it was just gas passing, and to be burping up yellow metronidazole. So good. It bonds in such a unique way :)

I hope you are all well. Sometime we will have to get together, don our scarves and turbans, and ride in the back of a truck on a bumpy dusty road, singing "Ka Kongdi."

Love, Esther

Chatting with Elisa

Elisa is one of our translators that we take along on all our clinics. She is 41 years old and probably the least proficient in English compared to the other two. But I love her so much. The slightest joke or funny incident makes her erupt into endless giggles and laughter. Her English is getting better and better the more time she is with us. Usually she translates for the pediatric station and that is my favorite station to be at, so I think we have naturally been drawn to hanging out together as we both hold babies and laugh at the kids.

This week at clinic in Esperanza, we finished early at peds, so I asked Elisa if she wanted to walk with me to see the river. It is a beautiful flowing river that reminds me a lot of the Umpqua in Southern Oregon. So we walked out there and sat by the edge of the river chatting about life in our halted communication.

Me: Elisa, have you been to Esperanza before?
Elisa: Oh yes, yes. It is good like Santa Clara. Not too much people. Francia is too much.
M: Yeah the houses are so close together back in Francia. How is your son doing?
E: Son?
M: Your boy.
E: Oh! He lives in Waspam.
M: Do you get to see him very much?
E: Sometime I see. Sometime not so much.
M: Oh that is too bad. I'm sure you miss him. So on Tuesday and Thursday you come on clinic with us. What do you do on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday?
E: My plantation! I go work.
M: Oh you have a plantation! What do you grow?
E: I have beans, the papaya, cassava...
M: Everybody is harvesting beans right now, right?
E: Yes, but it is not so good this year.
M: From all the rain?
E: Yes too much rain.
M: So you go work each week. You know all the people that come to our clinic say that have back pain.
E: Yes everybody, everybody!
M: I think everybody in Nicaragua has back pain! They work too hard in the fields.
E: Yes, work too much. I only carry little bag back, but you know other women carry big big bag. Too much!
M: And then the women have so many babies!
E: (Laughing) Yes, yes. Sarah, how many sisters do you have?
M: I have one sister and two brothers. There are 4 of us.
E: Ah...I have 5 sisters and 3 brothers.
M: Oh! So many! There are 9 of you!
This river is so beautiful. Why doesn't Francia have one?!
E: (Laughing) Yes, Francia river is only little and brown. Not good for much people.
M: In the summer I work with kids.
E: Oh?
M: Yes, they are age 15, 16...And I take them to a river like this to have fun. We get a boat and go down the river and at night we stop to camp on the side. For one week!
E: Oh do they work?
M: The kids? No, no. It is just fun.
E: About one year before, maybe two, I don't remember well...3 boys were coming down this river in a boat. They work at plantation far away. There was rain. Lots of rain and the river here was full. Big. And the boat...how you say?
M: Oh the boat tipped?
E: Yes the boat tipped and one boy fall out. He try to swim, swim, swim but not make it and he died right down there.
M: He drowned? That is very sad.
E: Yes.

M: Elisa, I heard that the whole village of Francia had an election on Sunday?
E: Election?
M: A big meeting to decide leaders?
E: Oh yes!
M: So what did they decide? Was it all good people you like?
E: Yes good people. We vote a new judge and new leaders everywhere.
M: What does the judge do for work in the village?
E: Well, you know if a boy take something, that is not good.
M: You mean stealing?
E: Yes, yes. The people take the boy to judge and he give the boy a lot of work.
M: He makes the boy work for stealing? I like taht. It's productive! Does the judge do marriages too? Or do people here get married?
E: Some people get married. It is good to wait a while to know your husband is good before you get married.
M: Do you have a husband Elisa?
E: Yes I have husband.
M: For how long?
E: Ten months.
M: Oh, that isn't very long. Are you married?
E: No, but I would like to. I know now that he is good man.
M: Well then you should get married! And soon so I can come!
E: (Laughing) Yes, yes. Sometime.
M: Do you have a party when you get married?
E: No, not so much.
M: Oh, in the US it is a big ceremony with a pastor and many people come. They usually have lots of food and party.
So Elisa did you have a husband before this man?
E: Yes, but he bad and I not marry. He drink a lot, not good. But my boy is very good. Never ever drink and good worker.
M: Oh that is good that he didn't pick up bad habits from his dad.
E: Sarah are you married?
M: No not yet.
E: How old are you?
M: I am 23.
E: But no children?!
M: Haha! Nope, no children yet. I am still in school. It is hard in the US to have children when we go to school for many years.
E: Ah yes. It is good to wait. Do you have a boyfriend?
M: Yeah I do.
E: Yes?! But you are here! How do you have a boyfriend?
M: I actually just saw him 2 weeks ago. You know when we left to go to Corn Island? He flew on a plane from the US to Corn Island to see me.
E: Yes?! Oh that is far!
M: Yes it was very good to see him. We have been together for 2 years now.
E: Oh so long? But that is good. You need to make sure he is good man. Make sure he not drink alcohol a lot.
M: Yes, it is good to know those things.
E: And Sarah, if he is bad you come live with me.
M: (Laughing) Ok I will do that! But it is very unlikely.

As we walked back from the river together, one of the other translators came up to us and said something to Elisa in Miskito. I asked,
"Elisa, what did he say?"
"Oh he say you are my sister!"
"Yes, yes Elisa. You are my sister.