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Honduran
Miracle
Titi was my
neighbor when I lived Sonaguera, Honduras. His appearance was a bit
strange. His head was slightly
asymmetrical. One day while we
were walking around town, I asked him, "When you were younger did you have
health problems?" He replied,
"Si hombre," with the emphasis that means, yeah, without a
doubt. He proceeded to tell me the
following story:
When he was
nine he fell out of a mango tree and suffered a serious blow to his left eye
socket. He pointed out a
good-sized scar running through his left eyebrow. Several years later, when he was 15, without warning, he
began hemorrhaging from his nose and the left side of his face began to swell
up. He was taken to the hospital
in LaCeiba, two hours away, the third biggest city in Honduras. They couldn't diagnose him, so they
sent him on to San Pedro Sula, the second biggest city. There, they said he had a tumor and
attempted surgery. However, in the
middle of the operation they decided they couldn't proceed and stitched him up. He has a scar about six inches long on
his throat below his left jaw. He
had been in the hospital in San Pedro Sula for six months when he was
transferred to Hospital Escuela, the big teaching hospital in Tegucigalpa, the
capitol of Honduras. Two surgeons
from the The United States were coming to examine him and another boy whom the
Hondurans considered untreatable.
The North American doctors said that surgery might be possible in the
US, maybe in Panama or Costa Rica, maybe even in Cuba, but not in Honduras. They said he had two or three months to
live.
It is not clear to me how or why
but another doctor gave a second opinion.
She had studied natural medicine in Japan. She said he should drink a tea brewed from the rinds of
pineapple, ground "pimienta gorda" (I think this is all spice.), and
honey. She prescribed drinking it
several times a day for six months.
The pineapple rinds were for cleansing, the pimienta gorda to stop the
bleeding and the honey would act as an anti-inflammatory. Four months later, not only was Titi
still alive, but the swelling was mostly gone and he had stopped hemorrhaging
from his nose. The natural
medicine doctor said he could stop drinking the tea. The other doctors said he didn't need an operation. At the time he told me the story, he
was twenty-seven.
Later, I went back to his house
because he wanted to show me a photograph of himself when he was in the
hospital. In the picture the left
side of his head, from eyebrow to chin, was at least twice as large as the
right. Titi’s parents, Don Rodolfo
and Doña Lola, joined us to look at the picture. They retold the story.
Don Rodolfo said he knew the president of Honduras at the time. The president worked on getting a visa
and money for Titi to go to the US for the operation. During this waiting period he started drinking the tea and
got better.
I asked if they thought it was
the tea or a miracle. Doña Lola
said, "Clearly it was a miracle.
I prayed every day."
Don Rodolfo said that when the doctors predicted that Titi had two
months to live he told them, "But you’re not God and God will decide how
long my son lives." Then Don
Rodolfo turned to Titi and said, "Did you tell him about the time you got
your dick stuck in your zipper.
Now, that was really serious."
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