Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Lynn's Travels: Peru, The Last Day

As usual, I will quote the text and then comment on it.

Some people had to return right away to their clinics, homes or hospitals. The rest of us arranged a tour of the countryside with a trip by train to Aguas Calientes and Machu Picchu.

From this website:

Aguas Calientes is the colloquial name for Machupicchu Pueblo, a town in Peru on the Urubamba (Vilcanota) River. It is best known as the closest access point to the sacred Incan city of Machu Picchu (in Quechua: old mountain), which is 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) away, about 1.5 hours walk. Aguas Calientes serves as a terminal for the PeruRail passenger train service from Cusco. Trains serve locals and tourists arriving from Cusco and Ollantaytambo to visit Machu Picchu.

Farewells took place before a large, comfortable tourist bus came to collect the travelers. We hugged and waved and genuinely hoped we'd see each other again. It had been another emotional and memorable experience.

However it was not emotional or memorable enough for Lynn to mention any particular person by name. This farewell is emotionally distant compared to the heartfelt farewell to Nilda and her friends Ana Maria and Rosa from Day 3 in Lima. There is no promise of continued contact or how much she misses them. Throughout the course of the 5 days of her medical clinic description, Lynn hammered away at her theme of “what the people really needed was someone to talk to” versus the actual medical treatment offered by her partner Dr. Pamela Bradford, whom Lynn consistently and continually referred to without calling her “doctor”, in stark contrast to the male doctors on the mission. This stream of self-complimentary dialogue tells me that perhaps Lynn was not getting enough positive feedback from others on the mission. When you get right down to it, it would be difficult for her to get any. She’s not a medical professional and she admitted on several occasions to being an inadequate translator. She takes long shopping lunch breaks and she takes a lot of pictures. I can only imagine the reaction she got from the medical professionals on the mission with her.

When she took these kinds of trips with her ex-husband Dr. Rod Johnston, she expressed a frustration in her inability to contribute much to what was going on. To her credit, she seems to be doing more than she used do when she was traveling with Rod. Nevertheless, I think she would be better served to participate in mission trips which do not require medical expertise, instead of continuing to try to outplay or outlast her ex-husband. Lynn has very deep pockets, and there is a great potential there.

I thought about writing more. There is just so much to say about the wonders and the mysteries of Peru. To continue would have made this diary far too long. Besides, the mission itself was the most important thing to share.

This is a nice thought, but certainly does not match Lynn travelogues in Thailand or Oaxaca, Mexico or even the first 3 days of this trip. Lynn originally described this as a 10 day mission. Lynn posted Days One – Five back-to-back on December 6-10 and Days Six-Eight back-to-back on December 13-15. Then she skipped a day and posted Day Nine on December 17. Clearly Day Nine was intended for December 16 and Day Ten was intended for December 17, just before Lynn left for the holidays. I don’t think Lynn had any plan to write a Day Eleven originally. Her final line on Day Ten was very Christmasy and very “end”-like:

As we ate and enjoyed, I couldn't help thinking about our last patient and all of the others out there who were hungry. Just a few more days until the gift-giving and gluttony of Christmas and here I was seeing the "other side of life". Perhaps this is the gift I gave to myself; something to put my life into perspective and to make me thankful, once again for all that I have.

On the way home, I read through my notes and tried to add anything more that came to mind. I thought about the young mother at the church who didn't want her baby and I wondered what had happened to her. I thought about the farmer who survived the murder attempt and the dear little lady to whom we gave the waist pouch. I thought about how different my life would be if I had been born in another place at another time and that I was going home to a reality the patients in our clinics could never imagine.

Lynn has had such good fortune in her life, it’s good for her to get some perspective. If she had been born in Cusco, Peru, her life would have been very different from the life she has now. For one thing, she would know how to speak Spanish.

There are a bunch of pictures here which I presume are of the town Aguas Calientes followed by the ruins in Machu Picchu. The Machu Picchu pictures match others I can find on-line of the area. Aguas Calientes is less certain for me. I found this website from someone else who made the same trip and Aguas Calientes looks different. There was plenty else to tell about a PeruRail trip, the sights on the way there, and the river for which Aguas Calientes was named.

Christmas 2010 has come and gone. I've tidied up and changed my calendar.

2011 For Better or For Worse calendars are still on sale. Hint! Hint!

For me things are almost back to normal. I'm grateful for having had another opportunity to see what's normal for others and my sense of privilege and gratitude has been reinforced once more.

What an interesting way to phrase it. Her sense of privilege has been reinforced. Her sense of gratitude has been reinforced. I find that I have to agree with this sentence whole-heartedly as a very accurate summation of her travelogues.

I sincerely hope that everyone who has "come along with me" on this mission in Peru has enjoyed the experience. Thanks for reading. May good health, good news and good friends be part of your new year. All the best!

I certainly have enjoyed the experience. Lynn did not disappoint. Bathroom stories abounded. Women doctors were disparaged. Peruvian health care was vilified. Peruvian men were slandered. Names of people and places were misspelled. The only thing missing was Lynn’s description of her alcohol consumption, which I blame on the Christian aspect of the Medical Missions International. All in all, it was a very fine travelogue. I look forward to the next one.

3 Comments:

Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

This stream of self-complimentary dialogue tells me that perhaps Lynn was not getting enough positive feedback from others on the mission. When you get right down to it, it would be difficult for her to get any. She’s not a medical professional and she admitted on several occasions to being an inadequate translator. She takes long shopping lunch breaks and she takes a lot of pictures. I can only imagine the reaction she got from the medical professionals on the mission with her.

So can I; while it's true we didn't hear from Lynn that she was told that she'd be of more use to them if she had simply cut them a check and stayed home, that's probably what they were thinking. As for her not giving Dr Bradford her proper title, we can chalk that up to Lynn's innate dislike (fear?) of women in the medical field.

What an interesting way to phrase it. Her sense of privilege has been reinforced. Her sense of gratitude has been reinforced. I find that I have to agree with this sentence whole-heartedly as a very accurate summation of her travelogues.

Another thing has been reinforced: her inability to see how people might interpret what she says.

3:31 PM  
Blogger howard said...

As for her not giving Dr Bradford her proper title, we can chalk that up to Lynn's innate dislike (fear?) of women in the medical field.

I suppose that could be the case. She had many interviews where she was not shy about saying that her ex-husband only hired women for his office because they were pretty. Having seen a picture of the women who work in Dr. Rod Johnston's office, it was clear that is not the case. Perhaps it was just this general dislike or fear which drives those kinds of statements. Unfortunately Lynn did not write a travelogue about her last trip to Peru, so we don't have any base with which to compare it. It would be interesting to see how she would write about it if the person to whom she was assigned was a male doctor.

4:19 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Does anyone have a link to the fix it comic that used to be link from here? I've been dying to re-read it but I can't find it.

2:39 PM  

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