At quarter to nine pm a van came honking into town and fireworks went off. Galindo came home accompanied by many family members who took off early this morning to help him check out of the hospital. It seems to me some kind of miracle that he’s made it back, but he is himself again, smiling and polite, laughing with the family that surrounded him. He’s walking on his own and can eat again. The doctors are worried about the damage that was done to his pancreas, and he’ll probably have pain for a while, but NOTHING as severe as the night they took him to the hospital.
His young cousins, Alberto, 5, and Chaleo, 9, had trouble staying awake until he got home, but once he made it they hit their second wind. Nas told me tonight that after Galindo was taken to the hospital Alberto asked his mother if he should drink poison too since he was sad about what happened to Galindo. It’s pretty crazy how these things hit the little kids. But tonight everyone is smiling, even as they yawn. Many of the people here have features I find at once strong and beautiful, but I have to say his aunts have never looked prettier to me than they did tonight, as though relief and euphoria made their smiles bigger and brighter their hair shinnier and more radiant.
I told Galindo he should let me know when he can eat chocolate cake again, and I’ll make a big one, because I was on the verge of making one tonight and realized he might be sad if all of us ate it around him while he couldn’t have any. He smiled and suggested, “How about tomorrow?”
These people’s cultural heritage leads them to put a lot of faith not only in prayer, but also in their dreams and local fortune tellers. The fortune teller said if he survived he would try it again. People have had some foreboding dreams, but maybe they’re wrong like the doctor who checked him into the hospital and said there was no hope has turned out to be wrong.
We took pictures tonight, as though to erase the awful pictures I had to take for them on Thursday. Nas and Galindo’s great uncle thanked us for the water bottles we sent with them as he was having a terrible time with the cold on the way to the hospital, and they thanked us for talking them into going all the way to the hospital. They said they might not have come to the decision on their own, that Galindo might have ended up dying here. They also wanted us to thank all of you for your thoughts and prayers.
If I could make one request: please, keep them up, for a little while longer.