The Beauty of the Rain

Time is flying here, as I never believe possible. Exactly one month from today, I make my way back to the US, for six days with my family and friends in NH, then a few days to catch my breath in DC before beginning orientation at Georgetown on Aug 3. I wonder where it all went? In some ways, I feel like I have not been here long enough. I feel now like I finally know most of the patients by name and am really starting to know them personally and they me. And yet at the same time, I feel like I have been here forever. The streets of San Fernando, once so disorienting, have become seemingly as familiar as those I grew up on, and I can navigate the twists and turns of my apartment in the dark.

We have slipped from the driest and hottest dry season on record (go figure, and I don't like heat) to one of the wettest months of June. It rains nearly every day, but I can't mind. For the most part, it keeps the air cooler, makes the nights downright cold when I use my air conditioner at night (which I love; something about wrapping up...) and I even made hot tea Sunday, when I came back from SAS's Father's Day brunch damp and chilly. Sometimes I wake up at 4 in the morning to the sound of rain falling hard, and sometimes when I wake up at 6:30 for work, the cars outside are beaded with droplets and puddles are just beginning to recede. I am lucky; most mornings when I am walking to wait for a taxi, it's dry. It may pour again once I reach the clinic, but I remain dry. Clouds here pass in spot downpours, sometimes harder than any rain I've seen, yet within a half an hour, the ground is nearly dry again. And the rainbows here....they stretch in complete arcs in reds, indigos more vibrant than I have ever seen. If I am really lucky and it rains in late evening, sometimes a cloud will pass with a fragment of rainbow opposite the sky exploding in pinks and deeper watermelons.

The beauty in this world comes in the most unexpected of places and, as I tried to convince my friend one night via text, in the details. In the rare sunset rainbows. In the white flowers that I can't stop staring at, in the ocean with dark clouds creeping by. In the view of PetroTrin, with all its lights and flames, right next to the sea that could swallow it whole if global warming keeps up. It is certainly a patient in the ward, who defaults clinic and was recently in prison and for all intents and purposes, would be someone I'd keep away from in the streets taking my hand in greeting every day and conversing with me quietly for as long as I have time for (I guess impressions are deceiving, yes?). It is in the moment last week, amidst the chaos of 30 patients, when someone told me how I was always smiling and I realized in an overwhelming sense just what my work here means. It is being curled up in Vidya's easy chair, watching Indian dramas with her and talking. In seeing the San Fernando Hill from kilometers away on the highway and knowing I am almost home.