Peru

I took six years of Spanish in high school but it wasn’t until I went to Peru the summer of my senior year that I took an interest in Latino culture. In Yanamono Peru, I discovered a love for Latin America. 8 years later, my mind still wonders back to that trip because in some intangible way, it has led me here.

I went to Peru as a part of a youth service mission. In my naiveté, I thought I could make a difference but in truth, I don’t think I made a dent and I am glad. I think in some ways, we as future doctors or healthcare providers are taught to disturb the world around us but Peru taught me that sometimes we have to let the world be as if we had never arrived. That is how we respect indigenous people and how we learn.

Along the Amazon River, surrounded by mosquitos, and the ever-smothering heat of a hot July, I learned to make chicken and rice wrapped in banana leaves, I watched men paint themselves with mud for the welcome feast and children play with buttons on a string. Sometime in my dreams, I see the children running on the single playground in the village or the men sitting around waiting for the sun to go down so they can work. There was a sense of peace there; a certainty in life and death that I couldn’t define. It was in learning by simply observing that led me to understand the people there.

I think too often as future doctors we hole ourselves to the singular pursuit of excellence and from that, we learn to do. We learn to stop the bleed, sew up the wound, give the right medications but sometimes we forget to stop, to reflect on both the grace and horrors of living. The Yanamano people taught me that there is wisdom in doing nothing; in waiting, learning what already exists, and applying it to a new context. Little did I know then how much the trip would instill in me a sense of wonder but looking back, I now realize it is the singular experience that imparted in me a love for foreign culture, for observational science, and for finding peace in what I can do.