Third World Reality || Visiting a Local Home in Managua, Nicaragua

This story was originally published in the first issue of Impact Magazine.

The cold air streamed down around me and I stood acutely aware of my instructions to speak only when necessary.

The room was sterile, but not in an unwelcoming way. The walls, though bare, were painted the same oddly appealling seafoam green as some of the buildings in the bright city. Natural light spilled in through the windows and lit the room, and a large adjustable lamp hung from the ceiling illuminating the bed, the centerpiece of the room.

I moved forward and peered through my camera lens as the doctor made the first incision. I was more intrigued than appalled and I kept my eyes glued to the surgery until the last stitch was tied.

In just two and a half days, the 22-person team I was a part of completed 33 surgeries in Nicaragua. The procedures, completed by two doctors, an ObGyn and a general surgeon, ranged from tubal ligations to hernia removals.

The days were long; sometimes we were at the clinic for 15 hours before returning to our hotel. My head would hardly hit the pillow before I was waking up to face the next day. But the work never actually seemed like work. I was doing something I loved.

I spent my days shadowing patients, and I would follow them through the whole process from pre-op to surgery to post-op. In particular, two patients stand out in my memory.

Veronica, a resident of Managua, has four children, one of whom is a 15-year-old boy who cannot walk or speak. When he was seven months old, Veronica said the doctors caused his condition when they gave him the wrong medicine. He doesn’t receive the care a special needs child would in the United States, instead, he sits outside of his house on a rocking chair each day, where it is actually cooler than inside because there is no air conditioning in the one bedroom residence. His family takes turns feeding him and swatting the flies off of him, which is the best care they have for him. Veronica came to El Samaritano Clinic, which was set up solely for the use of medical missions, for a tubal ligation so she would not have any more children.

I went to her house, if you could even call it that, after her surgery. The walls, made of concrete, encompassed a small living room and crowded bedroom and were covered only by a tin roof. There were no doors and no locks, a fact frightening to me because my team had been told not to go out at night as to avoid being robbed at knifepoint. Veronica pulled framed photos down from where they were hung half-hazardly on the walls and excitedly explained each one to us.

Before returning to the clinic, Veronica told us how grateful she was for us (she wouldn’t have been able to get the surgery without our team). She told me she would never forget us.

Another patient, Rinaldo, was about 38 years old and was unusual because he was a very large Nicaraguan man (most are quite small). He came to us with severe pain because of an enourmous hernia, which, not to be too graphic, had caused about two to three feet of intestine to herniate into his scrotum. He came into the clinic the first day, and was so grateful when we said we could do his surgery the following day. He waited until 8 p.m. on Tuesday for his surgery, not allowed to eat or drink anything all day. When he woke in the recovery room, he began to sob.

He explained that his pain had grown so intense that two weeks ago, he could no longer work at his construction job. In addition, he preaches the gospel in the streets to homosexual prostitutes at night, and he couldn’t even do that.

“So I prayed to God, ‘God, please help me,’” he said (translated from Spanish). “And God said to me, ‘Don’t worry, I’m sending you a cure.’ That night I went to sleep and I had a dream that I saw orange sky and a stranger driving me home. I didn’t understand it.

But when I woke up just now from surgery, I looked from my bed and I saw the orange walls and you just told me that you had a driver who was going to take me home, and I just realized that you are the vision that God gave me 15 days ago! Praise Jesus for you, praise God for you, God bless you all!”

There was not a dry eye around after he told his story.

All of the patients we operated on said they wouldn’t have been able to receive surgery without our care. The impact the team made in such a short period of time was massive, but I still believe that being part of a team that did 33 surgeries had more of an impact on my own life than it did on any of the patients.

♡

Kelley Louise is a travel + lifestyle blogger and model.
You can read more of her thoughts on The Culture Collective.
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