Bugging out

Bugging out is the title of an article in a National Geographic magazine. It was written in March 2000. It is not the main article. The main article was on Madidi's National Park in Bolivia. This other article is basically the journal of the photographer that accompanied the man that wrote the article.
The photographer was 3 weeks in Bolivia.
He visited some places that I visited. And he mentions some indigenous groups that I visited.
These are some of his notes:

Nov. 23...things scream here all night. Birds and bugs, I'm told.

Nov. 27.... In town we visti a woman bedriden for 6 weeks with a stingray bite. "Stingrays hurt so bad for so long, I've seen grown men cry like babies," Rosa María says.

Nov. 29...I touch a moth tonight, then wipe sweat from my face. I spend the next few hours with my face and hands on fire. Bugs here are toxic, Rosa María says.

Dec.4...Marcelo, our lead boat driver, tells a quick pig story as we pack up to leave.
"We were hunting the chanchos (pigs) last year near the Río Beni, not far from here. We saw a group of fifty. We killed ten. This made them mad. They charged us. We ran and climbed trees. One of my friends didn't get high enough, and the chanchos pulled him down. We heard screams for a while, then waited to come down. When we found him, we found only pieces. Many pieces."

Dec. 12... No fillings or repair work done in this part of the world. Teeth are simply pulled out, usually without anesthetic.

Dec. 16...I find my first boro, buried deep in the back of my left hand. Later in the day something much worse happens: I run out of toilet paper. Some leaves have painful toxins on them. I discover this the hard way.

Dec. 17...Choco shows me his foot, which has big red ants with enourmous black pincher hanging off it. Their jaws are so big and strong that they are used like stiches to clamp both sides of a wound together.

Dec 21... We boat back to town.

Dec. 22... María vistits the doctor, who removes a boro more than an inch long from her leg.
It's almost Christmas, and I'm more than ready to go home. I feel for the people here. Poverty abounds. Everything is worn out or broken. The kids in town swim in raw sewage. Rosa María points out that most of the world lives like this.
I know she is right. But I'm beat, and I just want to sleep.
Now, if only the boro in the back of my hand would do the same.

Editor's note: 8 weeks after Sartore returned from a second trip to Bolivia a wound on his lower leg began to grow. He had contracted leishmaniasis- caused by a flesh -eating parasite- throught the bite of a sand fly. The infection was eventually controlled by a combination of surgery and a 21-day intravenous treatment of an antimony compound. He will know in then years if he's fully cured.

I finished reading and later I had to go out for a walk (my way of digesting ideas). Something is moving inside my heart. Something I wish to keep quiet, for there is little I can do now.
But I also had other thoughts in my mind.
First I thought of how blessed we had been. In none of the trips we took did we have any sort of real complication. Hot weather and mosquitoes. But no tiger attacks, or snake bites...all was too smooth to be considered anything but a blessing. A true blessing. Angels watching over us.
and then I reread the last paragraph:
I am more than ready to go home.
I am tired, and I just want to sleep.

They are the same words that I said...after 11 years of living in Bolivia.
I have rested, but I am not ready to go back.
I simply refuse to go back alone and without the right strategies to actually get some justice done.
The church must be awakened...how on earth do you do that?
I do not know. But I will find out.