This one day I went with some of the healthcare admin folks who had 8 communities to visit. It was a long day: we started at six in the morning. I only went along for one community where we have some sponsored kids that needed shoes and backpacks–the rest of the time was tag-along. Close to the end of the day the healthcare folks had one community left to visit but got a call to go pick up an emergency–thankfully by chance a nurse was along with us. He’ll be working in one of the communities soon and wanted to visit it to see what was in store for him.

We arrived at the end of the road, the community where the emergency was is a steep half-hour walk. We waited there for a few minutes at the end of the road, and the contact who’d called us, the community healthcare-facilitator, arrived and said it’d be half an hour until the woman arrived. The emergency was a woman who’d begun labor earlier in the day and something wasn’t going right.

She arrived on a board being carried by half a dozen of the men from the community. The baby was already dead and the mother in severe condition. The dead baby’s father, grandmother and some of us who were in the pickup all climbed into the back and Don Checo put the pedal to the metal over a horrible road. It was an hour’s trip back to the hospital in Barillas. The whole time I didn’t see a single tear from any of the family members, not the grandmother nor the father. Things are like that often here, and I got to thinking about it. Maybe in country where there is so much death and pain, life has somehow a lesser felt value. I didn’t like that idea because it just seems so wrong, but nonetheless I thought it. I thought about my brothers and their wives and my parents and what it would be like if a child died in birth.

We got to the hospital where a nurse was standing outside to meet us–she placed an IV quickly and began checking vitals. The woman had begun to cry out in pain. I had already climbed out of the back of the truck–I thought about taking pictures of the nurse working, but out of respect or cowardice couldn’t bring myself to do it. As I turned to walk up to the office I glanced back at the grandmother and she was sobbing. In a moment I didn’t see her but I saw my mom and I broke down.