Dang Dengue

They suspended the semester! The entire student body, at every hospital in Havana, has been mobilized to take on the dengue epidemic where it starts…In the STREET! I heard that there are around 5,000 students that have been called to the job. We’ve been paired up, given a Dengue kit, which consists of 2 thermometers and an official pen from MINSAP (Ministerio Interior de la Salud Publica) and assigned a square block. There are no less than 150 people living on top of each other in my half of the block. Our job for the last month and a half has been to go into their homes, check for fever, teach them about the symptoms of Dengue, point out mosquito breeding grounds, and tell them to change the water on their altar to San Lazaro daily. My education is now as an educator. This is seriously an example of Public Health in action. Cuba has clearly dealt with epidemics before. They have already eradicated tuberculosis, yellow fever, and malaria through similar processes. It is a very unique medical training that I am getting here. And on top of it, I am making a lot of new Cuban friends. I’ve been invited to many ceremonious cups of coffee and tea as I’ve gone around the block (which is probably 30 times by now). The Cuban people are so giving. Some of the little old people that we’ve come across don’t get out much, so we sit with them and chat, take their blood pressure and let them tell us how wonderful their cat is. There is a little old man with diabetes that speaks fluent English. He said that he learned as a child from a Jamaican who always had a cigarette dangling from his lips. He has a Jamaican accent and curls up one side of his mouth as if he were holding a smoke with the other half. He gave us pineapple chewy candy. Then there is Savina. She put a spread in front of us one day to the likes of Thanksgiving. People have opened up there homes and in a short time we’ve become an integrated part of their lives.

I had my first Cuban Christmas. I needed to save the travel money to pay for my board exam this summer. It was hard not being at home, but I had a great time anyway. The first half of the break I spent studying hard, practicing putting in 10-12 hour days like I will do before my big test, and then for New Year’s I went with some friends to a little Cuban country town some 4 hours away to dance into 2012. My good friend Cassandra has family from this small town, Cumanayagua. We went there 2 years ago to see her cousin marry and that’s when she met Meinrel, her cousin’s best friend, the man she married a year later. That’s a whole other story that involves a bus full of drunk medical school students arriving 2 ½ hours late to a rowdy Cuban wedding! (and they waited for us! We did have the flower boy and the photographer on board!) So, over the past few years the connections to this small town have grown and given some surprising twists. It was a great way to bring in the curiously doomed year of the Maya.

I finished a good book recently, the first leisure reading I’ve done in med school, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It was a long discussion on how detached we have become from the food that we eat. It was interesting to be in Cuba while reading this book because clearly it was written about the average westerner. Cubans are intimately involved with the food that they eat. There is a neighborhood garden plot right next to my apartment. My first meal of the New Year was a nutria stuffed empanada. We don’t eat nutria in the US (they might in some places in Louisiana). They are oversized rodents (like the ROUSes-rodents of unusual size found in the Fire Swamp of the Princess Bride movie) and my friend considered himself lucky to have crossed paths with one. He spent hours preparing it. It started with butchering it and it ended up shredded and pot roasted in a garlic tomato sauce. It took a good amount of courage to open my mouth as he brought the fork-full closer. In that moment I thought of my BFF Boozy saying “I’m a pediatric nurse, it’s OK. Now open up wide, here comes the airplane!” The Cuban boys with their rudimentary English were calling them empanadas of the great mouse throughout the day. It was a charming food experience. Of another charming food related experience, my friend Adrian named his new breeder pig after me. She is the runt and they call her la flaquita after me, la flaca (the skinnyone). Her full name is “Como se dice la puerquita flaquita Heather.” My name here is always proceeded with “how do you say…” because it is a hard grouping of consonants for them to pronounce, and then they say “you know, the skinny one” as they make a fist and shoot their pinky finger to the sky.

I’m finally feeling really settled here. It might have something to do with having more space and no longer being on lock down within the confines of an old military base turned medical school. Havana is a crowded, dirty city with beautiful crumbling buildings and I am happy to be here. The other night I watched the moon rise through the skeletal structure of a once grand palace with only columns and staircases left making it a landscape where Escher meets Dali. The transvestite was hookin’ right in front and my buddy and I were catching pieces of conversation from the crowds of people walking home from the baseball game. There were way more people in the street than there were cars. It’s a phenomenon I encounter on a daily basis. People leave their homes and walk up the street to gossip with their neighbors. They sit on their stoop and shout friendly hellos at people passing by. The man selling flowers from a milk crate on the back of his bicycle rolls by. One woman walks around selling pastelitos (baby cakes) at 4 every afternoon, a man selling sesame crackers passes at 9 at night. The best word to describe Cuba is charming. The people are, the scene is, the humor is charming.