A Matter of Dignity

by Andrew Potok

  “It's strange to look back on all that now,” he says wistfully. “It was a time when I questioned everything. The biodiversity I loved, the whole spectrum of birds, insects, trees, orchids, deserts and rain forests, the whole wonder and messi-ness of life on the planet, I guess all of it translated into the work I've been doing ever since.”

  After Australia, David was still not finished exploring the world. “I had a huge need to prove myself physically and spiritually. With the Tagore poems still resonating in my mind, its locus had to be India. I went on bicycle.”

  In late spring, he biked from New Hampshire to Montreal, then shipped out to Europe. He biked across Italy and Turkey and Iraq, nearly dying in the desert from dehydration. He was skin and bones when he finally arrived at an ashram in northern India.

  “You must have been pretty damn strong to do all that bike riding.”

  “I looked like a stork,” he says. “I have strong triceps and biceps and thighs, but from the knees and elbows out it's very atrophied.”

  “Were you trying to torture yourself? St. Anthony in the desert?”

  “I was just trying to get there the best I could. And I had a passion to do it under my own steam. You're right, though, it was a spiritual journey.”

  “I'll say.”

  “When I finally arrived at the Shivananda ashram, I met the chief guru's representative. I asked to stay for a little while but the only thing he wanted to know was how much money I had. I thought, ‘Oh shit,’ and lied to him, saying I had none. Well, he said I could stay the night and leave in the morning. So much for Indian gurus.”

  David ended up staying at the ashram for four months. At his initiation ceremony, guru Shivananda, an enormously obese fellow, sat on his throne while everyone kneeled before him. David was asked to stand and say a few words about himself to the guru. He spoke about the importance of reaching people who looked inside as well as on the surface. The guru looked at him sternly and, in perfect English, asked what was wrong with David's hands.

  “This sounds like a Peter Sellers spoof,” I say.

  “Well, yes,” David says, “it was curious about this great big guru who was worshiped like a god but seemed very separate, very alone. It was hard to read his emotions. Frankly, I'm not sure he had any.”

  David was accepted into the community and, a couple of months later, guru Shivananda asked him to come to his private sanctum. “He asked me if I liked poetry. I said I'd written some here and there, not very good. He said he'd been looking for somebody to write his life story in poetry. I said I'd take a stab at it if he'd give me enough information. He said he'd had books written about him but none of them had said what he wanted to say the way he wanted to say it. So I agreed to do it. For the next several weeks I worked on what was essentially a tragicomedy.”

  “Not what he had in mind?”

  “Not what he had in mind. Basically I portrayed him as an ordinary man who had somehow got caught up in this image he projected and had become one of the world's most revered and loneliest people because nobody saw him for what he was, nobody saw his humanity. So by candlelight I'm reading him the poetic history of his life and, about a third of the way through, he raises his enormous hand and makes a strange sound which apparently meant I should stop.”

  “It sounds like you should publish this poem,” I say.

  “I hope I have it somewhere,” David says. “I haven't seen it for years.”

  “You seem to relish the ironies of your spiritual quest.”

  He smiles. “The next day the guru invited me again to his inner sanctum. He never mentioned the poem though he did say that several officials wanted me out of there, but as far as he was concerned, I could stay forever. I was eventually thrown out but for other reasons.”

  I urge him on.

  “I was visiting a woman, an American actress who'd gone through enormous disillusionment with Hollywood and had ended up in this ashram. She had apparently divested herself of everything, changing her whole life, but now she was beginning to question everything that went on at the ashram. On hearing about this, the officials transferred her from the room they had given her to a very hot, tiny, triangular space under the stairs. She began to fall ill, unable to sleep or eat, unwilling to accept food of any kind. She got sicker and sicker, more and more dehydrated and black around the eyes. I was concerned about her and talked to some of the officials and told them that she was sick, but nobody paid any attention. Because she was a great believer in faith healing, I told her I knew a mantra that I'd learned in another ashram up-river. In fact, I created one for the occasion. I tried to convince her that I could bring her out of the state she was in but I could do it only if she really wanted to live. She said she did. I put my hand on her forehead and said the mantra and told her that her pain would be transferred from her body to my hand. She said, ‘Oh, David, don't hurt yourself,’ and I told her not to worry, that I knew how to handle it. Though I was making this all up, I chanted the mantra. I could actually feel where her pain was by the tensing of her muscles. She hadn't slept for many days and nights. I said now the pain is going out into my hands. And she sighed and went to sleep. She woke up about twenty-four hours later, exhausted and hungry and thirsty but basically well. They threw me out because I wasn't supposed to visit her after hours.”

  In Mexico, David found that theater was often the only way to get through to people with urgent, lifesaving messages, as at the time when village midwives had learned that city doctors would speed up labor and minimize bleeding by injecting the mother with hormone products like Pituitrin, which can be fatal to the mother and the child, causing contraction of the blood vessels, which in turn causes spasms. If the baby isn't ready to be pushed out yet, the uterus can rupture and the mother can bleed to death. More than likely, the child no longer gets the oxygen it needs and can asphyxiate, resulting in either death or cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness or epilepsy, all because of the overuse of this drug.

  The reasons why the village midwives wouldn't stop using these hormones were fairly obvious but the solution was not. Birthing mothers insisted that city doctors were using it, therefore it had to be good. They also believed that it gave strength to the baby. It was the modern way and if the midwife didn't use it, the mother would threaten to go to another midwife.

  “The village health workers tried to talk with the midwives,” David says, “telling them it's too risky. We couldn't budge them, so we created a theater in which we put a man on stage to play the part of the birthing mother.”

  “A man?”

  “We had to use a man because no woman would pretend giving birth on stage. The first man we used was Miguelato, the village health worker who eventually became a doctor.

  “In the first scene, the mother begins her labor pains, sends her daughter to get the midwife. The mother says, ‘Oh, I don't think I have the strength to push this baby out. I want some of that medicine that will make it come faster.’ The midwife injects the mother with the medicine. The baby is born dead and everybody in the audience cries. At that point, a health worker comes on stage and explains why the baby died.

  “In the next scene a new midwife comes and both she and the mother are very cautious. They decide not to use the medicine. Things progress slowly and the mother says, ‘Maybe I should use the medicine’ and the midwife says, ‘No, just let it happen naturally. If the baby comes too fast it can tear the tissue.’ Then a bright, rosy baby is born. Somebody under the bed goes waa and at the end of the scene the health worker comes out with two babies. One is bright and rosy and the other is blue and dead. And the health worker asks why did that baby die? And they reply, ‘Well, because they used that medicine.’ And she asks again, and the audience answers. One more time she asks why, and this time the whole audience shouts, ‘Because they used that medicine!’ This participatory process is, in my experience, the only way to get the message across. It's no good to just talk to the midwives. It doesn't work. You have to involve everyon
e.”

  Nowadays, David lives about a third of the year in Ajoya, above the Rio Verde. He used to drive down to Mexico, but, busy as he has become, he now flies to Mazatlän, where he is picked up by a friend and delivered to his village. I guess correctly that the car was once his and he had given it to his friend. He says simply that the man needed it more than he did. Ownership seems not to matter. It doesn't pollute his life. When he's in Palo Alto, his California home, he mostly bikes or walks. He spends a lot of time in many different parts of the world, giving workshops and teaching. To some extent the workshops finance the health and disability projects, though half of them have no money and thus don't pay.

  With great diffidence he confesses to having gotten a MacArthur genius grant. “The money helps a lot with my upkeep and travels,” he tells me. “I'm pretty independent because ofthat. Both the programs in Mexico and I have always operated on a shoestring.”

  At the beginning, more than thirty years ago, he lived in a house way up in the mountains, about ten miles on muleback from the village. “Now, that was basic living,” he says, delighted to reconstruct those early days. “There was no electricity and the water had to be carried from a spring a few hundred yards away. But it was a beautiful spot at the edge of a pine forest, some four thousand feet above sea level. The villagers helped build it in the center of a circle of small communities, and people would come from all over to the house, which doubled as a clinic. I loved that house in the mountains and lived there for many years. In spite of real loneliness, it was the happiest time of my life.

  “During the rainy season the rivers would flood and there was no getting out. If there was a medical emergency, forget it. You were at the mercy of the elements and I really loved that. I need and enjoy solitude.”

  Eventually, he had to move from his idyllic mountain retreat because the village below was a lot more accessible to many more people, but while he lived there no one was charged for any of the health services he provided. People brought him barter, food or flowers, or they would plant or build or carry water, but there was no exchange of money. “People just gave what they had,” he says.

  “Would the word monkish describe this life?”

  “I wouldn't say monkish,” he laughs. “Maybe monkeyish. As in monkeys living off the land. It was lovely and simple. Sometimes I had to go see someone in the middle of the night, traveling for six or eight hours on muleback. I got to know all the mountain trails probably better than anyone else around there. Everywhere I traveled, I was welcomed. People would always run out to greet me. It was a wonderful feeling.”

  David just recently moved into a village house of his own. It has one large long room over a storage space. There's no kitchen so he eats most of his meals with a family next door. If he didn't, he'd have to carry water up to his room bucket by bucket.

  The room is filled with artwork, most of it created for him by the communities of people he has served. On his walls are tapestries with woven inscriptions, honoring him. On the few available flat surfaces stand wooden sculptures, decorated gourds, artifacts from Africa, Asia, India, South and Central America. “It's my own little museum,” he says.

  The population of Ajoya has shrunk from one thousand to seven hundred, largely because of drug-running and the violence that accompanies it. Once a traditional mountain village, it has entered the new century via this unwanted intrusion. The houses are close together, the poorer houses on the periphery. It's probably the only village in Mexico that is wheelchair accessible. Virtually all the village stores, the plaza, all the public places have ramps. For this reason, David sometimes refers to it as little Berkeley.

  PROJIMO, which means neighbor and fellow man and whose initials translate to Program of Rehabilitation Organized by Disabled Youth of Western Mexico, is housed in six adobe and brick buildings, functional though hardly quaint or beautiful. The cluster of houses includes a consultation area, the women's and men's dormitories with their kitchens and dining rooms, the workshops for making wheelchairs, prosthetics and children's toys, a physiotherapy area, a carpentry shop and storage rooms. Down one village street, a single bar has survived many actions and demonstrations mounted against alcohol and drugs, which have been responsible for so much misery, social dysfunction and disability in the area. “We are undoubtedly the biggest employer in town,” David says. “It makes me feel good. It's a haven for a lot of people.”

  The unique wonder of a place like Ajoya reminds me of my last visit to Poland, a year before the end of communism. A couple of days before leaving the country, I asked our driver to take us to Laski, a school for blind children some twenty miles south of Warsaw. He was more than perplexed: He was in shock. “Mr. Andy,” he said, “are you really sure about this? Laski is full of blind children. It is too awful.”

  My guide dog Dash was at my feet in the man's car. “Do I depress you, Mr. Marek?” I asked.

  “Oh no, not you,” he assured me, “but why go out of your way to be depressed? The world is full of beautiful things.” Though he cheerfully tagged along with us wherever we went, including the death camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek, he wouldn't get out of the car at Laski, choosing instead to bury his face in the newspaper.

  Inside this school for blind children, we were met by a bouncy young nun who danced us into the house, down a long narrow corridor, and into a large room decorated with kindergarten furniture, stuffed animals and huge beach balls. Two nuns floated in at the head of a chattering line of little kids and I was sure I had walked into a sequel of Madeline. My kid-loving dog was thrilled, his tail wagging furiously. One kid at a time was good fun, but fifteen? One of the nuns gathered the kids, all of them holding hands. “The gentleman has brought a dog,” she said, “a dog who guides him when he walks. If anyone is afraid of dogs, please stand behind the table. Everyone else can line up to pet him.” Most of the children lined up, breathless with anticipation, then, as Dash tried to sit without moving, one by one they touched him. Convinced that there was no danger in this dog adventure, they lined up for a second touch. When everyone was touched out, they ran around, playing games, climbing up the jungle gyms and rolling on top of the enormous, bright beach balls with the joy and security of the very fortunate.

  I tell David about Laski. “Anywhere, a place like that would have been a pleasant experience,” I say, “but in Poland, where everything was crumbling and hopeless, Laski was like a beam of sunshine.”

  “That's how I feel about Ajoya,” David says.

  Our Polish driver could not get out of Laski fast enough. He wiped his wet cheeks. “Mr. Andy,” he said, “I have never seen anything so sad in my life. I watched these children walk into the woods, all of them holding hands. They see nothing, they are helpless, but do you know what they were doing?” He dabbed at his eyes. “They were singing songs.”

  The original idea for the Ajoya disability program was to serve the mountain area where there were literally no doctors, no professional services of any kind. PROJIMO attempted to break down the walls of professionalism and give a voice to disabled people. Its strength has been helping those people who have most often fallen through the cracks.

  Word got out about PROJIMO, causing an influx of people from the cities. “We were overwhelmed,” David says, “but it showed us what a tremendous need existed all over Mexico.” Most of the people came from poor families who couldn't afford whatever services did exist, but it was getting some patients from well-to-do families too.

  The facility also had links with Project Interplast, started by Don Laub, the doctor who trained David in emergency medicine at the beginning of all this. David got a lot of professional help from people like Laub, mainly from the United States, but also from Canada, France, India and Africa. They came to teach, give advice, share expertise. Bruce Curtis, a quadriplegic who was active in starting the Independent Living Program in California, taught peer-counseling skills. Ralph Hotchkiss taught people how to make cheap wheelchairs, believing that each i
ndividual can contribute to the design of his own chair. John Fago came to teach the making of prosthetics.

  PROJIMO expanded and grew to a level never anticipated, but the program slowed because the government had come into the mountain area with its own programs, run by its own doctors. “We're the only place in Mexico where five different government programs were introduced,” David says, “the main purpose being to get rid of our villager-run programs, which are politically threatening. When people began to organize and take responsibility for their own health, when they began to learn skills which the professionals see as their monopoly, the Mexican government felt it had to do something about it. Then when village workers began to organize farm workers and educate them about their constitutional land rights, huge landholdings being constitutionally illegal, when the villagers began to go to Mexico City to protest the lack of land reform, that was truly threatening.”

  “You're a dangerous man,” I tell him. “Haven't they come after you personally?”

  “We've been raided by a combination of doctors and soldiers, looking for drugs. I've been arrested, health workers have been thrown in jail.”

  “I should think so.”

  “Especially since our program went from curative to pre-ventative to the sociopolitical, into the redistribution of land.”

  “But I take it that they haven't come after you seriously. They haven't broken your knees.”

  “Well, there was a time when I was warned by the drug czar in Mexico, who told me to leave the country and never come back because my life was in danger. I think the reason that they haven't done me real harm involves different factors. For one, I've had really strong support from the larger community, and the second is that I'm a gringo and they don't want an international scene, and the third thing is that even within the government there are people who are supportive of our program and would take a stand for us.”