The Doctor Estes Santiago Blog Week 7

  James Estes - Santiago, Summer 2009
  Posted on July 20th, 2009
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Last Reflection Note During my final moments here in Santiago, I’m taking a little time out of my day to do some reflecting over the events of these past two months and the progress I’ve made because of them. If I had to sum up these past two months into a single word, I believe I would go with “bi-polar” due to extreme natures of both the challenges I’ve faced and the euphoria of some the days I’ve had. The question I keep asking myself is "was it worth it all despite the stress and fear I had to go through?" Every time I ask that, a little voice in the back of my head answers with a swift reply “yes!!” No matter what anger, sadness, or overall frustration I felt within this past months, it was all worth it because I was able to learn a whole lot about myself and my limitations. I learned how to balance time/stress despite having 10,000 things to do. I achieved some of my life long goals on this trip including bettering my Spanish, balancing a huge amount of workload about a very complicated subject, going to see a desert, learning to live in a Latin-American country, learned a lot about medicine in general and the health care system, and much more. However, all of these lessons do not compare to probably one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned and that is love is the central dogma to life. What I mean by this is that you cannot have happiness or see progress without love being present. It is simply impossible to see accomplishment when it is only you out there because you have no one there reminding you of the hard work that you’ve done and instead you only look at the problems that have occurred with your progress. This love is unbiased, subjective, and essential for humanities defined term of happiness. Without it, no man/women would have reason to push forward or go that last little mile because when they looked around them for support, no one would be cheering them on and therefore, simply no reason to go on and finish. When I say it’s subjective, I mean that it comes in many different forms. It can be the love and support of your family (my host family was amazing), from your girlfriend/boyfriend (no matter your sexual preference), from your best friend, from the people you’re meant to help and take care of. From the community, to a nearby stranger whose passion is outstretched to all the land, love keeps us alive and I believe that for all of these years, I’ve been too blind to notice it. I always said that it is my goal in life to help others, but I don’t think I really knew why I did it and only up to this year did I realize the truth. My overall goal was to express my love to others in a way that I found useful and make them realize that I truly care about each person. Knowing this now, it makes my goals for the future, that much more attainable simply because they do exist in the realm of me expressing my love for others. Being a doctor and helping protect lives may or may not be what lies at the end for me, but by god I’ll strive for it if I know that the love from others is around me and can push me that much further. I’ve taken notices of the changes I need to make this next coming year and will adhere to them, but I believe the most central thing that I will focus on will be keeping to my goal of helping others because I now know why I do it now. With this in mind I will build a stronger community around me and hopefully the others around me whom I’m so thankful to have, will continue to share their love of me and thus push me to go beyond my limits towards my dreams and goals. As the Beatles so perfectly put it “all you need is LOVE” and that is the undeniable truth. I will miss you guys a whole lot and thank you for everything!! Ciao from Chile, James William Estes

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