El Dongo

Enriqueta Carrington Pardo

“Doctora, please come quickly, it’s terribly important.” Still afraid of emergency cases, I rushed into my primitive little adobe doctor’s office, which had neither electricity nor running water, and there lay my patient, obviously mortally wounded. It was a serious case, quite beyond my newly acquired surgical knowledge, an enormous gash in the chest, the lung was exposed and visibly expanding with difficulty at each laborious breath. “Please save him, he is terribly important to me.” All I could promise was to do my best. Benito, my nine-year-old assistant, bravely held the sufferer, while I sewed him before an open-mouthed audience consisting of most of the village. This was a new experience, for I was a twenty-three-year-old medical student, and the patient a scarred old warrior of a fighting cock, who had won many a bet for his owner.

Countless strange experiences are met with during the six months of social service. In Mexico, all medical students are required, after six years of professional studies, to work in some rural district, far away from hospitals, laboratories and drug stores. They must practise on their own, study the hygienic conditions of the locality; try to impart some notions of modern medical techniques to the inhabitants, vaccinate them all against small-pox; etc. This etc. includes dealing with many unique emergencies not described in any text book, and in endeavouring to cope with them, the young doctor gains a great deal of practical knowledge, and in many cases learns humility combined with an insight into human nature. All this is called the Servico Social, and thanks to this system, thousands of doctors have been brought to places in Mexico previously in complete isolation from physicians and modern drugs.

In 1946 I was sent to the little village of San Miguel Regla, in the State of Hidalgo. This is a dream spot, with old Spanish ruins and a chain of lakes making the dream complete. Due to its beauty, San Miguel has long been visited by people, not only from Mexico City, but from all over the world, and therefore the inhabitants are no longer primitive and are familiar with modern life. They accepted me, a young woman doctor, and half-foreigner at that, asked for my services and entrusted their children and even their fighting cocks to my care. The difficulties lay in the villages scattered far away, especially those along a river which runs through a deep canyon, the descent into which is so hazardous, that often a horse will refuse to attempt it and even a mule will look over the edge with horror, trying to turn back to the safety of the flat land on its rim. The people in these villages are completely isolated; many of them have never been out of this profound and narrow canyon, which they call “La Barranca”. Their only recourse in case of illness is to witch-doctors, who possess a great knowledge of herbs, and none whatever of hygiene.

The most influential and feared of these “healers” lived in El Dongo, the remotest village within my territory. This old woman, when at a loss to state the cause of some serious illness, would not hesitate to accuse somebody of having cast an evil spell on the sufferer. She knew the private lives of all the villagers, and therefore was intimate with the grudges, resentments and jealousies which naturally flourish in such closed communities as these. On the strength of her word alone, several people had been murdered in vengeance for allegedly being the cause of the perfectly natural death of one of their neighbours.

I had been warned not to go near El Dongo because this old woman, to put it mildly, would certainly make me most unwelcome. Before my six months of service were up, it was my duty to vaccinate everybody in the district, including those living in El Dongo. But it really was dangerous to impose myself on them: I had been hoping that somebody would ask me to visit a patient there, and so have the entrée to the village at their request, and would not have to force my presence on them. But four months had passed and still those vaccinations in El Dongo were on my conscience.

One day Benito, with his usual mysterious fore-knowledge of which patients were going to call on me that morning, shouted with his shrill nine-year-old voice, that the most important man in El Dongo was coming up the side of the Barranca, and that he would not tell anybody what he wanted the Señora Doctora for. One hour later, for the Barranca lies far away from San Miguel, a whole procession arrived. One poor woman, unable to walk, was strapped to the back of her son, who had carried her up the whole treacherous and rocky ascent. When I commented on what a heavy burden that was for such young shoulders, he rebuked me by saying “Señora, it does not weigh me down, it is my Mother,” (unknowingly repeating a well known and beautiful story), the Mexican Indian is rightly famed for the respect and love he feels for his parents. The woman was soon treated. She had a terrible abscess on her foot, which was causing a great deal of pain, and once it was lanced she felt much better. I saw her signal to the head of the party, an old and dignified man with white hair and, surprisingly, blue eyes. Obviously the first patient had just been a trial, and now the real reason for their visit was to be broached.

“Doctora, can you tell what disease a person has if we show you his clothes? Because my grandson was too ill for us to bring him up the Barranca.”

I had to get to that village and this would be the only opportunity, so silently praying for help, I asked them to show me the clothes. They belonged to a very young child. I took a chance. More than 80% of infants’ deaths in Mexico are due to digestive disorders, infectious diarrheas and parasitosis. Most probably this child had been ill quite some time and was therefore dehydrated and starved, so I said in an authoritative voice: “Your child’s intestines are attacked, he has diarrhea, he vomits, he has fever, the hole on the top of his head has sunken, the little feet are swollen, his nails are white. The old man made up his mind “That’s enough, please come with us.”

Then began the long ride. Past the still waters of the emerald-blue lake with the stone cross on a pedestal in the centre, placed there by the Spanish Count of Regla more than two hundred years ago. Here I had come to seek consolation and tranquillity when my first patient died; here also I had thanked God for the life of little Pablo who had been choking to death with a piece of melon skin lodged in his throat. Now riding past, I sent up a prayer for assistance. We rode past the ruins of the colonial silver-works in which beauty had never been sacrificed for the sake of utility. Of course these ruins are haunted, but their ghosts had never disturbed me – quite the contrary – I had always felt that this young woman in the unfeminine riding breeches rather amused them. They are jolly ghosts, for at night they go into the stables and braid the horses’ manes, at least according to Benito, who really should know, as he is the son of Domingo, the horse-groom.

We rode on, an hour and a half, along sloping country-side planted with corn or with magueys. From every little hut we passed came the greeting “Adios Doctora, may God accompany you.” At last we came to the edge of the Barranca and changed from horse to mule, much to the relief of the horses. We rode past the Peña del Aire which is an enormous rock balanced in an alarming manner overhanging the path and seemingly threatening to fall on the travellers stumbling down, always down. It began to get hotter and hotter, because the canyon is so deep that it is almost tropical at the bottom, while San Miguel is temperate. At last we reached the river bed and rode beside it in the blessed shade of huge nut trees.

El Dongo consists of a few little houses of adobe on the bank of the river. The opposite wall of the canyon of smooth, grey, rounded rocks, is so close, that daylight hours are short. One hears the continuous echo of the call of tropical birds accompanied by the deep and even murmur of the river.

We went into the best of the houses. After the glare of the sun it was difficult to see in the dim interior. The window had been covered in order to prevent any fresh air from entering, for the Indians believe it to be most dangerous for the sick. I was offered the only chair, after it had been carefully dusted off. The men stood around clutching their straw hats, the women squatted on the floor, immovable, with patient resigned expressions on their brown faces. In one corner there was set up a primitive altar with Christian images and a few lighted candles which provided the only illumination in the room. Then I saw the patient lying on a straw mat; he was in an even worse condition than I had described and an examination revealed that he had broncho-pneumonia complicating the intestinal infection.

The witch-doctor had done her best for him. There were green patches made of some potent leaf, stuck on each sunken temple. A poultice of sour smelling herbs covered his agitated little chest. On the floor around him were drawn mysterious signs in black which were certainly not of a Christian meaning. The mother said that he had been given many infusions to drink, had been swung around by the feet in a “rebozo” (shawl), and the witch-doctor had pushed up his palate in order to raise the hole on the top of his head. It all had been to no avail; the child was worse.

Now I, representing modern medicine, would do my best, please God it would prove to be more effective than the efforts of my sister the witch-doctor. Out of my doctor’s bag came the bright box containing a sterile hypodermic syringe, and then, real magic: a little bottle with some yellow powder- Penicillin. All the child’s relatives watched the preparations. Only their innate politeness prompted them to make no sound to protest when the needle plunged into the poor little unprotesting body. To them, who had never seen an injection, the wonder consisted in that the needle did not hurt.

They did not know that the doctors who had lived in the era previous to that of the anti-biotics considered this yellow powder to be unquestionable magic. Then they continued to stare while I hung a bottle from a rafter; this contained saline and glucose solution. They wondered at the long rubber tube.

A shudder ran through the mother when she saw another long and vicious needle being attached to the end of the tube. Often it is difficult to locate a vein in a de-hydrated child, but this time my fervent prayer was answered and at once the dark coloured blood could be seen entering the little glass at the base of the needle as the vein was punctured. The life-giving fluid began to flow into the child, who had been at the point of death, principally due to its loss. All during the long night we sat there. I wondered if the witch-doctor were not locking in on us, seeing the immovable group, watching the eyes all fixed on that bottle hanging from the ceiling, slowly emptying drop, by drop, by drop. Every three hours I would re-boil the syringe, the blue flame of the alcohol lamp adding to the eeriness of the scene. At the third injection the little boy gave a slight whine and opened his sunken eyes. Oh, to be able to describe the expression in those brown eyes. There was a look of weariness almost unbearable, of knowledge beyond reach, of supplication, of age; all of which made one wonder where that little soul had been during those hours of unconsciousness.

Well, the immediate battle was won, for the moment the child would not die, his relatives’ trust had been gained and I felt sure that they would give him the medicines necessary to clear up the infection. But I knew that I must not leave the village before making friends with my rival the witch-doctor…….