Friday, April 5, 2024: W. Roger Carlisle's "A Yearly Mission Trip From America to Nicaragua"

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Bio: W Roger Carlisle is a 75-year-old, semi-retired physician. He  currently volunteers and works in a free medical clinic for patients  living in poverty. He is on a journey of returning home to better understand himself through poetry. He hopes he is becoming more humble in the process.


A Yearly MIssion Trip From America to Nicaragua


Our medical mission has arrived in Nicaragua.

Driving along in the cool comfort of our bus,

we see donkeys carrying firewood, people walking on dusty roads,

carrying food and produce to market, dry gullies, dusty plains,

skeletal horses, dry river beds, giggling girls walking to church.


Giant Pochote, Acetuna, Jocote, Roble,

Caesalpinia, Brosimum trees fill the horizon.

The only things protecting the people from the heat.


The operating rooms are small,

equipped with old refurbished equipment

from twenty years ago. The clinics have dirt floors,

medicine is in short supply. Outside, a line of children

with crossed eyes waiting to be fixed,

blind people waiting for corneal surgery.


Every year the doctors ask the same questions:

Why are the Nicaraguans so happy?

Why are they all smiling and talking to each other,

when they have so little? Why hasn't poverty

defeated them?


We have lost our routines, put on new glasses,

our vision of how things work has changed.

We have left the re-enforcing platitudes,

the Self-righteous sermons, the certainty of on time delivery

of Mr. Brown from UPS.


Our mission has ended.

We ride past banana, sugarcane, and coffee plantations,

owned by friends of Daniel Ortega,

on the way to the airport, not understanding

how we have been changed.


© 2024 W. Roger Carlisle


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