Mother's Day

It is Mother's Day here. Unfortunately one of the mothers in our San Mateo project woke up to a dead son. There is no doctor in San Mateo but hepatitis seems to be the suspect. I'm not sure what to say other than that this seems to be uncommon. Casasito is trying to pay for the siblings to see a doctor in Antigua as a preventative measure, but apparently the village members explained the "truth" about what vaccinations are to the mother; they explained that a vaccination is just a doctor injecting the disease they are trying to avoid into people. So the mother thinks that her options are to hope that her remaining children didn't become infected, or to guarantee their infection by getting them vaccinated.
I used to think that in international aid, keeping people alive with medicine was more important than sending them to school. That, however, is treating only the symptom. The illness that ails these villages is not something tangible medicine can treat. All you can hope for is that each generation will reject more of their parents' fallacies and keep learning to read and speak in a language that allows them to seek knowledge beyond that of their village's.
Meanwhile, the volunteer here who works at San Mateo is loading a miniature coffin on top of a crowded chicken bus in order to give to the mother of one of his students the ability to bury her son in more than the t-shirt he died in.