At the moment in which Vergil and Dante are about to enter Limbo in Dante’s Inferno, Vergil guides Dante by saying “Let us now descend into the blind world.” I must admit I’m a Dante Alighieri fan, and it’s always exciting when I can bring in Dante into whatever I’m doing. As I’ll explain, our most recent adventures with the Hospital de Câncer de Barretos has given me that exact opportunity.
A few days ago, Megh and I left Barretos to travel alongside one of the mobile units of the Hospital de Câncer de Barretos — mobile unit 3, to be exact — in one of the northern states called Mato Grosso. Mato Grosso, from everyone’s description and personal experience, is significantly hotter than the state of São Paulo and also possesses significantly fewer resources, with their economy based on a lot of logging as well as cattle ranching.
The really exciting thing, however, is the fact that they have a similar accent to São Paulo! The regional variations of pronunciation in Brazil, as we have learned, are actually very pronounced (pun completely intended), so we were glad to know that we wouldn’t be adding another communication barrier.
Our first destination in Mato Grosso is a town called Marcelândia, named after the founder’s son, Marcelo. We first flew to Sinop, a nearby city with an airport, and then continued by car towards Marcelândia. Most of the road is not paved, and its distinctive feature is the intense rust color of the ground, and the opaque dust clouds that form when cars drive on it. Being from Houston, I have been in situations where I can’t really see the road due to rain, but this was an entirely new experience. For quite some time along the way we were just surrounded by dust, blindly driving into more dust, sometimes seeing other cars only appear way too close for comfort.
I had two particular thoughts during those moments. One, this car has amazing air filters. Two, I just found the title for my next blog post!
But the comparison goes further than just being blind and hot. Dante wrote his epic poem during his time in exile from Florence as a deep form of self-exploration, since the poem features the journey and growth of himself as the protagonist. In addition, the poem is not only lauded for its use of language (and sort of solidification of the Italian language itself), but also for the intensely vivid and complicated world he creates and describes.
Now, obviously Megh and I are not exiled from anywhere, and we are not entering an Inferno of any sort. But we are indeed witnessing and experiencing first-hand the journey and work of a “real” mobile unit, one that travels far from Barretos into more impoverished states. The position of an out-of-state traveling nurse is actually one the toughest and least popular in the Hospital de Câncer de Barretos due to this very fact. And just like Dante, in being thrown into a new world with intense experiences, we are being not just forced but inspired into active exploration, of both the new world and ourselves in it.
What we’ve found is certainly not a blind world, but definitely an intensely vivid and complicated one. In particular, we’ve learned more about two aspects of the functioning of the mobile units — the more localized system of the health care done in the mobile unit itself, and the more decentralized system of how the mobile unit is, well, mobilized.
Since we have yet to finish our time with the mobile unit, I’m not going to write about it just yet, so this is really a teaser and a status update.
Today is Sunday, and the mobile unit is closed. Tomorrow, we leave for União do Sul, the second stop, and Megh and I are going to be riding in the passenger area of the mobile unit’s truck itself.
Oh yes, and we’re leaving at 3:30AM.
So let us actually now descend into the blind world of riding in a massive truck hauling a complete mobile cancer prevention unit on a dirt road in pitch black darkness surrounded by clouds of red dust!