Today I made a new best friend named Oscar. He's 4 years old and pretty much the most awesome kid I've ever met. Oscar lives at the Josafina Martinez hospital, which specializes in children with respiratory problems. Oscar has a trach (http://www.tracheostomy.com/faq/what.htm) in his neck, so he can't talk, but he certainly knows how to get his point across. We played soccer and watched Barney, and he made me clap when the kids on the TV were clapping, dance when they danced, etc. He kept pointing to his mouth when we were playing so I asked the nurse if he was hungry but she assured me that he was just making fun of the way I talk in Spanish. It was so hard to leave...I wanted to take him home so bad. Oscar's been living in the hospital since he was 2 years old, and sees his family about once a week, unless they can afford to take more time away from work and their other children.
The hospital was actually really awesome, considering the fact that it's entirely free, but considering how many kids they have to take care of and how few staff, I can't help but wonder what sorts of developmental problems these kids are going to develop from being left to hang out in bed by themselves all day, with no one but their mechanical ventilator to talk to. It was so sad to see so many kids depending on machines in order to survive. In the play/school room almost all the older kids were wheeling around those big oxygen tank things that you see old people with in the commercials against smoking. It's a lot easier to handle seeing that sort of thing when you feel like the person could have seen it coming, or avoided it somehow. Not so easy with kids.
Speaking of smoking, I'm doing a research project on the health effects of smog in Santiago. It's really fascinating and I'm talking to a professor in the Evironemental Studies department about continuing it with an independent study/research project in the fall. Here's a gem from one of the papers I'm using: "...in winter in downtown Santiago of Chile we have detected 5 ng/m3 of benzo(a)pyrene (BaP), the most studied environmental carcinogen in respirable particles. Thus, a non smoking inhabitant breaths benzo(a)pyrene BaP levels equivalent to smoking 10 cigarettes a day." It makes me so angry how little is being done about it. Environmental pollution shouldn't be viewed with the sort of complacency of a far-away problem -- like a storm that we know is coming but we have plenty of time to prepare for. The storm's already here, and the kids can't friggin breath without inhaling particles of imminent death. Ya, I'm being super dramatic. But still -- I just feel like it should be viewed as a lot more of an emergency, but it's hard to convince people (let alone a government that has the power to institute emission regulations) that something they are already living with daily is actually killing them and something needs to change immediately.
The picture is one that I took from the top of Cerro (hill) San Cristobal on Sunday, which was a day after it rained. They tell us to go to the Cerro the day after a rain because that's when the smog is the least obstructive of the view. In other words, this is the smog on a GOOD day. Enticing, ya?
A few years ago Oberlin introduced me to the idea of responsibility being associated with privilege. It's a concept that I think I've always understood subconsciously -- that I've been giving a whole lot of opportunities and I should use them to help those who weren't. But during my time at Oberlin was the first time the topic was really verbalized/intellectualized for me. I've been thinking a lot during this trip -- which is an opportunity that I am extremely privileged to have been given -- about how I'm supposed to fulfill the responsibility that I'm now charged with. As in, how can I use my experiences here to "pay it forward"?
I know that a lot of people don't agree philosophically with what I'm saying right now -- like my friends who say that they worked hard and don't deserve to be shafted in college admissions on behalf of preference for minorities. I understand their beliefs, I just don't agree with them. For me, it's a very personal issue -- it's hard to avoid using the word "guilt" but it's different than that -- if I use the word "guilt" than paying it forward is just a way of alleviated my own guilt and therefore selfishly motivated (insert Ayn Rand discussion here). Maybe it is, but if people are being helped, who cares if it's selfishly motivated? Either way, instead I'll say that I feel extremely privileged to have the opportunities that I have been giving and I feel also obliged to give something back since so much has been given to me by luck and money. This is really just a very long way of saying that I'm leaning towards going into a career in Public Health/environmental health research...using my talents to try to figure out a way to reduce this friggin smog and help the kiddies breath withing taking in carcinogens and other nasties while they're at it.
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