La Tristeza
Trip Start
Aug 08, 2008
1
12
42
Trip End
Oct 12, 2008
Puriscal,
Costa Rica
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
One of the nuns from the nursing home came to speak with our group this afternoon. She told us the story of how the center was founded, how times have changed since then (for example, how increasing government standards of care have reduced carrying capacity for many nursing homes due to lack of funds) and how their patients had ended up there. There were a few times I had to clench my teeth to keep from losing it, especially when she talked about how the male-female imbalance we've noticed is due to a cultural perception that women of any age can be useful in the family, but old men are often just cast aside.
Some of the residents, she told us, were too poor to stay in their homes. Others (mainly men) had children who might have taken them in, if they'd had any sort of relationship with them beyond being a sperm donor (my tasteless choice of words, not hers.) Still others had families who wanted to do right but just couldn't put up with them. Jose, one of the feisty ones, apparently used to be a violent alcoholic; he claims to have spent time in prison for shooting someone, although the nuns doubt the veracity of this story. (Though after hearing how he bought a watch off a new resident for 2,000 colones-roughly four bucks American-and turned around and sold it to another resident for several times that, LaVerne the corrections officer has no doubt he's done time.) He can't drink at the center, of course, and to us he seems like a harmless dirty old man. But like the former cowboys who now seem too weak and disoriented to ever have corralled a herd of eight-hundred pound steers, he is a shell of his former self.
Clenched teeth or no, I almost did lose it when she told us about one of the residents, a woman named Maria (not the one I've mentioned previously, I think) who marches out to the phone every day to "call" someone and insist he take her home. She's only talking to the dial tone; she has no one to call. She lived alone; her neighbors were the ones who contacted the authorities and got her taken to the home, because they noticed signs of dementia in her and were afraid she might burn her house down. In an attempt to keep the phone lines free, the nurses put a disconnected handset in her room, but that wasn't good enough. She's still with it enough to know when she's being conned, and even if she has no use for it, she wants a working phone.
The nun thanked all of us for coming to work with the elderly. She said it takes a lot of love and patience to work with these people, and that they kept asking for us when we weren't there over the weekend. The time we spend engaging the healthier patients gives the physical therapist time to work individually with the severely disabled patients. I think she said something else about us being a blessing from God, or being blessed by God, but the roar of my bleeding heart in my ears drowned her out.
I don't know how Sarah, Lydia, and Anna do this every day and stay so cheerful. I needed an entire bag of chocolate-covered coffee beans to recover from that.
