Old San Juan is a place of incredible beauty … a walled City on the sea, very European with narrow Cobblestone streets, each ending at the ocean it seems. There are parks and salsa music dances in them. Banyan trees are huge and lush while the Palms are thin and slick unlike the ones back home. El Mortro, the fort is majestic and imposing.
I am staying at El Convento, an old convent that has been transformed into a luxury hotel. All of the rooms face into a lovely courtyard with fountains, quaint bars and swirling fans. A slight breeze blows from the ocean so the trees sway over my head as I sip coffee.
The rest of the city is a mass of urban sprawl ... as though New York City was slammed onto an island. Congested, backed up, crowded and huge … the place has more than its share of poverty. I’ll leave the beauty and pleasant delights of Old San Juan for the dearth of the rest of it today hooking up with my friend Dr. Jose Vargas-Vidot, known here as Chaco.
We met over a decade ago when we were both being recognized for our work in Washington D.C. We hit it off immediately because of our mutual love of Liberation Theology. Chaco thinks he is Che Guevara, and actually looks like the dead Cuban Revolutionary. He’s been at my house on Tybee and I’ve been to his house here and we stay in touch when he’s not out on the streets taking medicine to where people need it.
This is the fourth trip in four weeks and I’m feeling it. Crisscrossing the country twice takes a toll. I love the work, travel and it is rewarding to be in the Caribbean again. I’m a child of the ocean and an island boy and it is cool to be here but I’m really ready to stay home for a while. There are a lot of things that I need and want to do. That joy of those things will commence on Friday.
Yesterday I strolled the plazas, churches and sea side of this city. I was with the famous Dr. Jim Withers the champion of street medicine but my mind was somewhere else … back home.
It’s funny … throughout my life I’ve gone everywhere and couldn’t wait to get back and do it again. I conquered challenges and work. I was generously rewarded and recognized for it. I was an adventurer forever lusting for the next adventure.
I’m doing it again with this work … taking the crazy idea of rallying nurses and doctors to practice medicine again the way that it was originally practiced … where the sick are … without buildings … but in a spiritual way … one human helping another. Given the complexity, insanity and entrenchment of the American Health Care System … I may as well be attacking windmills. But it is good work with very good people who inspire me.
The last year has changed me though. I am somehow now the calming presence … no longer the one stirring things up … helping others to fulfill those roles in better ways.
So today I’m diving back into all of that! And I will give it my best.
But I’m homesick.
Soon I will be back to it.
But not soon enough.
