“I know, I know she was gift.”
“Love, then why do you not dress her? Why did you have trouble giving her your milk?”
“She was a gift, but I did not ask for this.”
Jeni sits across from me, eyes flicking from side to side, as though searching for an escape.
“This is the reason you’ve brought her in ill, though, my señorita – she must have a shirt, or jacket, of some sort.”
“It’s hard to take care of her. She is so little. I don’t know what she wants.”
I struggle for the right words, distracted by…

Elastic band…
on pastel green
underskirt.
Gnarled hands
Torturing themselves
with nerves.
Shame
flutters above the wrinkles
ringing her eyes.
 
A feminine embarrassment,
At odds with
the story of the cracks and twists of these strong limbs.
So thin, yet knotted to tell a saga
of work without end.
Gently, I try, to push away
the smallest sections of her clothing,
that allows me to still examine effectively.
She mumbles her humiliation
but the pain overcomes
socialized reaction.
 
Small bulge of her stomach undulates unnaturally
under the prominent ridges of the ribcage.
Decades have been etched into this

Only Human… A short video to take a glance at a day in my life, here in the little town of Cotundo, working at a public health clinic in the Amazonian lowlands of Ecuador’s Napo Province.
 
 

Sharing the Celebration of the New Year
Location: Riobamba, Province of Chimborazo, Ecuador

My host brother Christopher, my host mother Nancy, and I, on New Year’s Eve, in the Park of Lights in the Center of Riobamba. A true Ecuadorian family, though Chris was surprised by the horrifying brightness of the camera’s flash here .

…
Before being gutted and roasted manually in turns over an open candela (a half-indoor, half-outdoor bonfire), the guinea pigs are grown for a little under a year, fed grasses and scraps, and kept outside the house in cages to get fattened to the correct size. They

I was running, chasing the elusive breeze. The greenery was thick on either side of the thin, winding road, and sharp rocks beneath my feet on the dirt path were painful through the thin soles of my shoes.
A strange sight, the foreign girl running through the jungle at 4 in the morning, before the first light, eyes focused on the endlessness above. I was determined to track every pinprick of light in the stars that littered the night sky. In clusters and strewn carelessly, there seemed too many, too close together. The bright, distant lights formed web after interconnected…

She lies flat as a board
and is too skinny
Her eyes
The nurse has no words for them
Buen expresivos, she settles on.
Wide and bright
They look as though
They seek to be separate
from her too-small face,
Where her cheeks have sunken in,
Already at age 7.
And her lips are purple,
Bruised with worry.
 
I probe gently, to examine her stomach,
Which is jumping weakly
Beneath her ribcage.
There are rises and drops
In the arrangement of bones, beneath the dark skin that looks ready to tear,
Stretched too thin to cover this small female…