Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [49]
The last speaker was the school principal. He was a maybe five-foot-tall Mayan who smiled only briefly and spoke perfect English. After the bare minimum of pleasantry he said that what the school needed more than anything else was a new fence and that they would be setting up a gate to charge patients one lempira per consultation. The teachers would man the gate.
All hell broke loose.
“We’re like a bake sale,” I said to Max.
Could we make a cash contribution or come back later and put up a fence ourselves? It was important that the care we gave be free, that people not have to pay.
The principal shook his head. If we were here to do what was good for them, we could start by listening to what it was that they wanted done, and what they wanted was to charge one lempira per consultation and use the money to buy a fence.
It became clear from the discussion that Calvin Peters had known all along about the fee and that he himself had been paid a fee by the school to recruit our mission. When we got the money he had gathered from us at breakfast it was three days later and at an exchange rate considerably less favorable than that offered by waiters, cabdrivers, and assorted street urchins. Exchanging dollars for lempiras made no sense anyway, as there was not a merchant in Honduras who wouldn’t gladly deal in dollars. The rev was doing nicely for himself.
Lorenzo James was outraged and urged a boycott of the clinic we had spent all day setting up. We should just run shuttles with the Land Rover and go out into remote villages like he and his crew were planning to do and as the previous two missions had done.
“They’re a very proud, grateful people. They have no money but bring food and carvings. No one in the bush has ever seen a doctor. Forget the clinic.”
The pharmacy, the optometry equipment, and lots of the other equipment we had set up wasn’t very portable, and who was to say the school principal and teachers and community would want to let us come and go as we pleased if we weren’t taking care of patients?
“Could we wear shorts in the bush?” I asked Max.
We offered the school two thousand dollars cash to let us take care of people for free. No go.
Max said that if we had to charge, maybe we should make it more like five dollars a head and see if we could come away with some real money. No one laughed.
So if we didn’t open and run the clinic as advertised, what would we do? Visit Mayan ruins and fish for the twenty-pound largemouth bass I had heard existed in a remote lake? Maybe just chill at the beach resort? I would have been more than a little disappointed to have come all that way, set up my little area, and then not be able to see how it worked. We should have offered them ten thousand dollars and found ways to take most of it back like third-party insurers do.
A little after midnight, Gavin Archibald, our fearless leader, got up and said that we couldn’t and wouldn’t shortchange the Honduran people. We would have one of our translators at the desk monitoring the teachers collecting the money, making sure no one was turned away. We were professionals and certainly weren’t going to refuse to treat thousands of people over a lousy forty cents per patient seen.
At breakfast it was announced that anyone who wanted to could be taught how to pull teeth and that the four-teeth-per-patient limit was silly. There is a fancy word for twisting and rocking back and forth while you pull that sounds like the fancy word for burping.
A hospital in Rhode Island had donated two thousand sets of blue disposable paper scrubs, enough for each of us to have a fresh set every day. A battalion of white people in dazzlingly bright blue scrubs descended from the blue-and-white bus and took their places in the school clinic, watched by Hondurans who had paid their fee and were waiting patiently. There were adolescents on bikes with assault rifles strapped on