A visit home

 We returned to Portland for 2 weeks to see our kids over Christmas.  Gabrielle is finishing up nursing school, and will join the ranks of health care workers working either holidays, or the days around them.  Thomas is finishing his engineering training in the Navy in a couple of weeks, and may very well be at sea next year.  We wanted to take advantage of this opportunity.

It was great to see them, and we had plenty of quality time.  However, since we don't really have a home base in Portland anymore, and airfare was prohibitively expensive, we didn't really have much money do do much while we were here.  It was a low key Christmas for sure.  And the inclement weather had us shut in a bit - first an ice storm, and then a regular storm that downed a lot of power lines.  Gabrielle took the opportunity to work some shifts at her old pizza joint to earn some cash, since her nursing program is too intense to allow this.  Thomas, Brian, and I all had different people we wanted to see, and shared a car among the three of us.  There was a fair amount of down time at an air b and b with very poor internet, and no real cooking facilities, just a microwave and a toaster.  It was in a nicely wooded area, but it rain pretty much constantly.  It was dark until 8 am, and then never really got light, falling back into darkness at 4 pm.  It is frightening how quickly living in Ecuador has decreased my tolerance for all of this.  In the future we will likely not be so insistant on being together for the actual holiday, and spend the money going someplace nice where we can have more relaxed family time and afford more fun stuff to do.

Thomas and Brian did go to a hang out in Portland one afternoon, and I tagged along, deciding to have lunch by myself.  I had read that downtown Portland had cleaned up some areas and were welcoming more people back, but this was not the case in the area we were.  How different the week between Christmas and New Years has looked in the past!!!  I feel much safer in Manta, and this is not a risk free area by any means.  My heart broke more for all of the mentally ill people, wandering around, without a purpose, or huddled in doorways.  It is obvious that being unhoused and untreated makes mental illness much worse.  I finally found some type of authentic Mexican restraunt, where I was welcomed in, and got to practice my Spanish, and felt a little better.  Then I went to Voodoo donuts, for old times sake, and because they have now hired a security guard.  After I had waited in line, and got a few donuts to share with my boys, I was waylaid by a man asking if I had gotten the donuts (encased in a distrinctive pink box) out of a tree - "I left my donuts in a tree!  I think those are mine!" he kept insisting.  At this point, I just waited in the locked car, and practiced with Duolingo.

I know I keep harping on affordable housing, but the difference between the two cities is so huge.  It's not just that having adequate affordable housing keeps people from living on the streets, but it also hugely benefits those with housing insecurity.  Housing in Oregon takes up so much of people's wages, that there is little left for self care.  There is a large group of people who are not on the streets, but chronically stressed by the threat of being there.  I know this because they were frequently on my caseload as a care manager.  There is another layer of people that are not stressed by keeping their housing, but not able to adequately save for retirement, or a house due to high costs of housing, gas, health care premiums, child care, rising food costs etc.  Housing greed has a huge impact on community health.  And low income housing is not the answer, in my opinion, because it only benefits a small group of people, treats them as "other" and does not allow people with higher salaries to access this housing and be able to actually save their money for home ownership, better child care, better self care, or whatever their need is.  I strongly advocate BASIC affordable housing for EVERYONE who wants it, assuming those with means would like pay the premium for more luxurious accomodations.   Just normalize not spending such a large portion of your wages on housing.   It would benefit the community as a whole so much.

There are plenty of perks to living in the US over South America.  For example I drove 8 days across the country to bring Maya to Miami for her flight.  I would never in a million years attempted driving by myself a couple of days in South America, even if I felt comfortable driving here.  Even with a hired driver, I would not go at night.  Much of the intrastructure is considerably better in the US.  There are many more higher educational opportunities in the US.  But the US is far from perfect, and Oregon in particular could learn something from this developing county.

My next post will be about our first serious health care here - which was Maya, who became gravely ill while we were in Portland.  She is better now, although her long term prognosis remains very guarded - which is not surprising, as she is very old for her breeds, and already passt her expected life span, even without this illness.  But the cultural response to her illness was interesting so say the least, as were the vet costs (spoiler alert - 5 days of daily vet HOME visits, a few lab draws, and a lot of medicine costs less than one vet visit for an ear infection in the US).  Stay tuned.