Veterinary Clinic in Wimauma

I don’t think I could tell you quite what I expected. It was new. All of it. There’s worth to that though, the utter vulnerability that comes when thrown blindly into something. A wildly peaceful vulnerability. On February 20th, I went to sleep in the back of a 45 foot RV, in Wimauma, Florida, with my mom, my grandpa, a peppy Caucasian woman named Kelly, and a tall Haitian man named Ronnie. My grandfather, Barry Kellogg, is a retired vet for the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) with which he was part of a disaster response team. Spin the globe with your eyes closed and point, and he’ll have a story for you every time. When looking into how he could continue to help communities after retirement, he looked into the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and their policies. He found a small town of Wimauma to be a predominantly Mexican, migrant farmworker community that is extremely, extremely poor. What people often forget about are the places that are the hardest to reach, yet need help the most. So he set up a mobile veterinary clinic and gives free help every month to the pets of the town. Under his wing, he brought two more vets on board, and that’s where Kelly and Ronnie came into the picture.
We all met the night before the clinic, and had dinner in the RV. My mom, a former French teacher, helped Ronnie understand the conversation when he needed it. The next morning, we pulled into Beth-El in Wimauma, where two people and their dogs were already waiting for us. The Spanish signs did nothing to treat my utter sense of “what is going on”. With me I had a peanut butter sandwich, paperwork, my hair up, and the phrase “No hablo español” close by. I was hoping that’d be enough to last me until 2:00. When we got the ramp down from the RV, and the vet room all set up, there was already a line of five or so people waiting. A couple people even said a happy hello to “Dr. Barry”. I’m no dog, but even I could smell their eagerness. The lowering gate took my expectations down with it, but I was shortly proven wrong. Our very first patient was a beautiful woman by the name of Danielle Oreille, and she brought with her a huge german shepherd. Little did I know how accurate this depiction was of Wimauma. The sheer toughness, the “german shepherd attitude” of the people, that I would catch in little snip-its, was truly something admirable.
Pretty much immediately, the language barrier became an issue. Some people spoke English, but I used a translator, named Jay, for help throughout the day. Jay subtly served as our bridge over troubled waters, letting the people of the town know they could trust us. Jay was a local. She could quickly respond with “dos” every time someone came up and asked how long we were staying at the site. People would calculate how much time they had to scoot home and round up their ten dogs to bring them back… which surprisingly is no exaggeration. The difference of how pets are looked at and treated in Wimauma, would make you step back. Confusion tugging at your brows, as we in East Greenwich stroke “Fluffy” by the fire, and feed him homemade meals. When one man’s name was called, he jutted his hand down, searching around for his dog’s leg, grabbed it, and then proceeded to carry him up the ramp like that… a toothy grin slapped on his face like nothing in the world was wrong. People would drag their animals and carelessly handle them, yet I could tell the emotional attachment was still there. Immensely. I could see the vet table from the table where I was working, and the way they’d hold their dog’s head as they were getting the vaccine was no coincidence. They’d try very hard, in broken English, to tell my grandpa about a problem with their pet, and ask his help. The love was there. More than I’ve ever seen.
My day in the sun was full of moments. And little moments like that are often the ones that scream the loudest, that talk to you the most in the corner of your head. The little moments that capture a whole day, a whole feeling, without even really trying to. I have two moments stuck in my head, and they’re caught on repeat. Towards the end of the day, I was handing paperwork to a middle aged man, when he started shaking his head. I assumed he meant he didn’t speak english, so I called Jay over. However after a short conversation with Jay, I soon found out that the man didn’t know how to read or write. There I was, the whole day, ensuring I spelled Chihuahua as “Chee — hooah — hooah,” and an adult stood in front of me that did not even know the feeling of thinking with a pen. Jay did the paperwork with him outloud, and he ended up naming each dog on the spot, just so we could put some names down on the paperwork. Replay. Complete replay. Later, one of our last patients of the day was leaving the site with her puppy, and she got all the way to the side of the road, until she turned around. The woman walked back up to me, locked her eyes on my own, and said, “Gracias.” At that point, with my head pounding and my face sunburned, I knew why I did it. I knew why I ate lunch inside, away from the public, so as not to rub it in that I have a lunch. I knew why it hit me so hard, and I was okay with letting it. In the end, you do it for the “gracias.”
