The Essential Question

Today is Global Studies Day at my little school. Each year we choose a continent on which we base our thematic studies and the whole school then agrees on an essential question, which we attempt to answer throughout the year in ways that are age appropriate and interesting to our students. This year our continent is Europe and our question is "How does where you live affect how you live?".

As a Spanish teacher, one of the things I've been trying to show my students is how language and culture are never mutually exclusive. The way people express themselves through language is often very revealing in terms of how that person's culture has taught them to conceptualize life. For example, while talking with the other Spanish teacher, who is from Colombia, we both struggled to find a fitting translation for the word "nursing home". For the last two years, I have been watching my grandmother slowly fall apart. It started with some dizziness and some feelings of being over tired and has culminated in two major falls, a broken and then later re-fractured hip, a "small" heart attack, renal failure, and most recently a "minor" stroke. And while I was able to talk about the surgery she needs and how she's feeling and what happened, I couldn't figure out a right sounding word for nursing home. Then it occurred to me that in other countries people live with their families. It isn't expected that you move away at 18, never to return. People actually live in inter-generational family communities, where grandparents are around to help care for newborns, just as parents are around to take care of their elders.

I live in Seattle. My mom lives in Arizona, my dad lives in Oregon. I have two aunts and a grandma in Wisconsin, an aunt, an uncle, a grandma and some cousins who live in Iowa and a wealth of my dad's extended family, some of whom I've never met, scattered throughout Georgia and Tennessee. I see my dad once a month, and my mom once every 3 months or so, my aunt and grandmothers maybe once or twice a year...and this is my family. Because we are all so far apart geographically, it has been crazy trying to negotiate care for my grandmother, especially now that she has been immobilized by the fractured hip that no one seems to want to do surgery on.

As I think of that essential question: how does where you live affect how you live, today I'm thinking about this country and what happens to the old and the sick. In this country we live with the constant fear of either getting old or getting sick or both. I didn't have to see Sicko to know what happens when you don't have health insurance. I've had my own first hand experience at walking a mile and a half to the nearest free clinic, only to wait four hours to be treatment, all because the insurance I had at the time didn't provide me with out of state coverage. Or them there was time time I got a huge bill because apparently my insurance didn't cover one of the tests my doctor wanted to run on me. At first I was really angry that the doctor hadn't told me it would cost so much, but when I really thought about it, I was pissed because I thought having insurance meant something.

When you have insurance, you're supposed to have at least a modicum of assurance that if you get sick, you will be able to get the care you need without having to sell off your furniture to pay for it. That is the point of paying monthly premiums right? And I know that I am privileged in that I even have insurance. There are so many people who don't, but what kills me is that it is always someone who does have insurance who gets to make the laws about who gets care and who doesn't. Here in the U.S., we live in a warped capitalist meritocracy, where if you can't afford something, then you don't deserve it. We live in a country where only the strong and the rich have the right to survive and it makes me ill.

I live in a country where, though my grandma was a public school teacher for her entire life and has dutifully paid her taxes and social security, now that she is ill and stuck in a nursing home, medicare won't pay her expenses because the doctor has refused to treat her. So there she sits, in a wheelchair, with a hip she fractured over a month ago, that still isn't healed because the doctor is afraid to do the surgery...but now what. There is no life plan. Maybe we're not the Hiltons and don't have that platinum care package that pays for you to stay at a luxury resort spa and have daily rehabilitation and massage therapy, but the way the nursing home is designed, it's less about helping someone to live to their potential and more about keeping them somewhat sedated while they wait to die.

If how we live, is a bi-product of where we live, I don't want to live here anymore. I don't care if you call me a communist or a socialist, I want to live in a country where we all have access to the medical care we need. I want to live in a country where people are treated with respect, regardless of their age or ability, where people who are ill are cared for and treated with kindness and regard for how terrifying it can be to feel that vulnerable. I just wish that place were here.