I was all set to write to everyone yesterday, thinking it’d been a while and lots of things have been going on. I generally let things stew in my head for a while before getting anything out. But now I’m prompted to write not about our latest adventures but the tragic events of last night.

Yesterday was actually a pretty good day, language class, corn harvesting, two health talks, and then we were invited over to our friends’ house where they were having a religious ceremony and feeding everyone dinner. It was a long and tiring day that prompted me to go to bed at about 9. I was dead asleep when our neighbor Nas Palas came hollering “JAIME! JAIME!” at our door just before midnight. The events are all cloudy in my head since I was half asleep for a lot of it, but I remember him yelling for Jaime (Fletch) and when we opened the door he said, “Galindo swallowed poison and we think he might die. We need your help!”

What? Galindo is our 17 year old friend, the oldest grandson of Nas Palas. He’s a really cool, polite guy we’ve enjoyend hanging out with. In the post on harvesting corn, Galindo is standing in front of Fletch. How and/or why did he swallow poison? The thing is, it’s really hard to get straight answers from people here on a regular day, but when everyone is being woken up and adrenaline is rushing and they’re not even speaking spanish, it’s REALLY hard to get the story out. Fletch was out the door a good 10 minutes before I was, as things registered really slowly and then I thought, “Shit, he’s gonna have a hard time understanding anything they say to him if I don’t get over there!” I was out the door then. Women where running around everywhere. Galindo was about 20 feet from where we sleep, but there are three walls between us, our plank wall and two adobe walls. I walked into the room where Fletch was sitting next to him on the bed, and his grandmother was rubbing or slapping his back, I’m not sure which. There was a soapy pool on the floor in front of him and suddenly he started vomitting profusely. Fletch told me later they’d given him soapy water with cooking oil in it to induce vomitting.

This sounds horrible, but in talking after everything settled down we both admitted to each other that our first response to their telling us he’d ingested poison was to not believe them. I think, maybe we were both just suspending belief until we could figure things out because stuff is just confusing here. So when I walked into the room and saw him getting ill I thought, “Oh god, what if this is something contagious we could get?” He looked awful, and I was pretty scared about the possibility. Then we realized his vomit smelled like gasoline or something petroleum based. They kept asking us, “What should we do, what should we do?” This is the problem with being a health worker when we have very few qualifications in giving on the spot advice and everybody thinks you have an answer to everything. We thought they probably should not have induced vomitting, but it was too late to bother mentioning that.

I ran to call the Peace Corp 24 hour health line and woke up the nurse, explaining first that the emergency was not with myself or Fletch, and told her the situation. While on the phone explaining the smell like gasoline or something petroleum based, a friend of ours came to say he had in fact drank Tamaron, a local herbicide. The nurse said he needed to get to a hospital immediately. It was quite likely he could die. The closest actual hospital is 5 hours away, and we weren’t aware that anyone in town had a car to take him anywhere. She said we should have him drink milk, but he was already getting sick.

As I ran to find his aunt who is a nurses’ assistant and seemed to be mostly in charge of the situation, I told her what the nurse said, and she informed me they’d found a truck and they were getting him in to town. There was such a confusion in the room, women patting him on the back, wiping his forehead, blowing on him, sleepy eyed women who were aunts and great aunts, his grandmother, his sister who was in tears and trying to dress the baby who was screaming from being woken up. It was too late to give him milk, and we would probably be the only people in town who have it readily available in our house. One of his great uncles showed up and hoisted Galindo on his back. I picked the baby up, still screaming and set her on her mom’s back to be tied up and carried off. We made it down to the waiting pick-up, and some 15 people were probably in that truck by the time it took off. Five or so women had babies strapped to their back, and Galindo’s uncle who is only 4 years older than he is came literally staggering up the road and climbed in the cab after his sister boxed him on the ears, slapped him and yelled at him for being drunk. Reina told us she would keep us informed, and the truck took off.

So we were very wide awake, confused, and upset at 12:30 am. The way it was all presented to us, that is to say, people’s phrasing of the situation, led us to believe he’d just mysteriously wound up with herbicide in his belly. His uncle was drunk, was he drinking with him? Did someone give it to him or force it on him? How did this happen? We lay in bed, since it was the only place that was warm and tried to get everything out of our systems, but just as we almost fell asleep we heard a truck rumble through town and woke up. Why was there a truck at this hour, had they already come back? No, it was a cargo truck, too big to be them. Then we were almost asleep and a text message from the nurse came in. Then we were asleep, I think, and heard the familiar family voices outside as Reina shouted, “We’re back, Galindo is in town with my Dad and the doctor.” We shouted goodnight back. Then there were all sorts of weird dreams about them coming to tell us he was dead, and roosters crowing, and a dog howling this pitiful cry, which was particularly strange because the dogs here only ever seem to growl and fight.

At 6:30 we were woken up again by a family member who wanted to know if I had a certain man’s phone number because he was Galindo’s maternal grandfather and they wanted to contact him. I DID have the number because he’s a man on the health committee in the next village over and wants us to start giving health talks there. And we knew nothing of the connection before this? We gave up sleeping at this point.

I talked to Reina just outside our door as I was on my way to get water to boil for coffee. She said Galindo had said something to her mom, his grandma, about wanting to drink this poison, austensibly to kill himself, and his grandmother had tried to tell him it was a bad idea. He did it anyway, but apparently regretted it at some point and told the family a few hours after he’d drank it. That’s when we came into the picture. And at this point in the story Reina had to run to catch the bus to go in to town and check on him.

The story seems to be that Galindo has been depressed, who knows for how long. Reina sited the fact that his mother abandoned he and his sister when they were all little, and he’s had a hard time dealling with it for years, meanwhile his father has been in the US off and on working and not really around. He may not have a biological mother, but all the women in the room last night were people who’ve been there taking care of him his whole life. This family is so kind and loving, very jovial any time we’ve ever shared a meal or been at an event with them. It’s really tragic.

At about 8 our language teacher showed up as per usual. We told him what had happened, and he said Galindo would be about the 6th person in the last year to attemtp suicide this way. He told us the herbicide is a really powerful one and some of the people died instantly, but in one case the boy told his family and they induced vomitting. He lived for about 20 days after drinking the stuff, never getting out of bed. His organs were so burned from the chemicals he didn’t eat again. Things do not look good for this boy, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Today most of the family is in town, but two of our host sisters and 3 of the little grandkids. The boys, 5 and 9 yrs old, have looked frightened all day, so the last time they came to visit I invited them in and made a big patch of popcorn. We at least got them to laugh and smile some teaching them how to throw the kernals up in the air and catch them in their mouth. It’s almost 3 pm, and we’ve had no news since this morning. I am beginning to feel the news will be bad, and resigning myself to that.

This whole situation is difficult and bizarre and depressing and surreal. But it’s not terribly unlike things that  happen in the US. We were talking and thought it strange that teenage suicide is something that happens here on a semi-regular basis as there are some great things about living here in spite of it being economically depressed. I guess it goes to prove once again there are some things in humans that remain the same, no matter the cultural, economic, or geographic borders we mark as differences.

It’s 3pm, Reina just called to say they’ve give him a gastro-intestinal wash in the town 2 hours away. He’s conscious and talking, and they think they will bring him home this afternoon. We’ll keep you all updated on how this turns out.