“When did your belly start to ache?”
“Yesterday, after lunch.”
I had examined him through the anamnesis and found fever, dehydration, diarrhoea, and abdominal pain. It looked like gastroenteritis. It would be a normal scene in an emergency room. But I was sitting on the floor of the room I would share with him and six other people in a little dormitory in a small village along the Way of St James, the legendary 1100 year old route leading westward through northern Spain to the city of Santiago de Compostela. All of us had a vieira (scallop shell) around our necks identifying us as pilgrims.
“Have you eaten anything today?”
“Yesterday I ate some rice with peppers and oil. Since then, I haven’t eaten anything, I’m too sick.”
No hunger along the Way—there are plenty of restaurants, bars, and small markets where you can buy fine cheese, ham, bread, and tomatoes to make sandwiches or prepare a hot meal in the dormitory’s kitchen, but the regional dishes may be tricky for the unprepared pilgrim.
“Okay, people, let me see what we have here.”
They offered their possessions—food, medicines—before I’d asked. On the Way you learn to share, to give without parsimony and receive without embarrassment, a communal life style necessary in dormitories where you eat, sleep, and bathe with people of all sexes, ages, and countries, united together by our common human nature with all its frailty and glory.
A Spanish woman went to buy some crackers for him; a Swedish couple gave some charcoal tablets for diarrhoea; a Brazilian woman took his hand and began a soothing conversation. I went to the dormitory’s kitchen to prepare a bottle of homemade oral rehydration solution using the World Health Organisation’s formula: salt, sugar and mineral water, with sodium bicarbonate and some lemon juice for flavouring.
Later, I drained some blisters on sore feet, ate something, and went to sleep and rest for the next day’s walk.
“I’m hungry,” he says the morning afterwards, when he joined us at the dormitory’s table for breakfast. I gave him my last apple to eat with the crackers, the WHO formula, and some camomile tea.
He was still eating when we left the dormitory to follow the Way to its end.