Meeting the Madres

May 11, 2011

Today was the first day I spent doing surveys since I returned. Oscar the teacher worked overtime on Monday for the Mother’s Day extravaganza so he and the students had Wednesday off. Filomena obligingly used her day off to guide me around the neighborhood. We travel to five or six houses up the mountain in Las Mercedes to do the surveys. It was much slower going than when the mission was in town. At the mission I just sat in the outer room of the clinic and saw children as they left the medical team. This new method of survey collecting involved a 10minute vertical hike between houses, but it is gorgeous out here.

I really enjoyed going to the houses. It was nice to meet the mothers of the children I’ve been playing with. I think they appreciated that I bothered to come out to their homes. One of my favorite moms is the mother of two of the boys I’ve played soccer with. She is a spunky looking woman who was wearing a faded lime green trucker cap. She thought I was hilarious, but for once it was because I was cracking jokes rather than whatever it is about my person that inspires uncontrollable giggles in the teenage girls.

The boys told me they didn’t brush their teeth because it didn’t feel like it. I feigned shock and told then that they better brush their teeth or their mother would tell me they hadn’t and I wouldn’t let them use my soccer ball. Maybe you had to be there, but mom and I thought it was hilarious. She probably isn’t much older then me, and she handed me two pataste on the way out the door. With bare åhands. These things are like squash shaped cactus leaves. Their half-inch long spikes stabbed my hands, but I appreciated the gesture and tried to look like I wasn’t in pain as I put them in my bag. The next day the boys showed up looking for the soccer ball with the coffee spots scrubbed off their teeth.

Seeing the mothers at home was yet another confirmation to me that they work hard, and their work is under appreciated. In my survey I always ask what their mothers do for work. If the mother doesn’t work in the field, the respondent (mother, child, or father) almost invariably shakes their heads no and says they cook or that they work at home. I always tell them that what their mother does is work. It’s not that I don’t cook at home, but at home I cook what I’m going to eat for dinner once a week and then eat that all week. Breakfast and lunch are usually something from the refrigerator that has to do with milk, lunch meat, etc. None of these strategies work if you don’t have a refrigerator. Even if I apply the “post-slumber party cold pizza method” where I disregard the fact that my food has been sitting out, I still have to cook pretty much every day. Beans take forever, laundry is tricky in the rainy season, and there is really just no way to keep the floors clean with four kids tracking in the mud. They work hard.

I know there were a lot of very persistent and passionate women who brought about the elevation of women’s rights in the US, but I now realize that the dissemination of the microwave and the refrigerator probably provided the conditions necessary for the movement to succeed. As I work my way through medical school and think about what my family might look like someday, I’ve realized that the woman’s role in our society hasn’t changed so much as expanded. Not that I’m complaining - I want to be a doctor, and I want to be a mom who does all of usual mommy things (well maybe I could do without dishes and laundry). However, when I think about the usual “mommy things,” modern conveniences are key. What if there were no dishwasher or washing machine, no microwave or refrigerator, no vacuum cleaner or restaurants?