Dr. Maria came to Charleston from El Salvador.
She practiced medicine at the Barrier Islands Free Medical Clinic on Johns Island.
She was indeed salvador to the migrant workers who moved through the farms and fields of the low country of South Carolina.
She cared for them, and they loved her back.
She was small and dark skinned with bobbed black hair and deep brown eyes.
She was a great soccer player, and all of the workers wanted her on their teams during their Sunday evening games.
She was brilliant and kind, and was the most competent, compassionate doctor for miles and miles around.
She lived on Johns Island and ate her meals each day in the orchards under the shade of the peach trees with the workers.
Little Salt, his mamí and his abuelo often ate with her.
They were from El Salvador, too.
Little Salt had earthy brown eyes and wore the same pair of tattered over-alls every day.
Dr. Maria noticed his hair was always cut in a crooked line across his forehead.
She also noticed that his face was always serene as water on a still, windless day.
Of the many, many patients she saw at the clinic, he was her favorite.
He was fond of her, too.
He liked that her skin was the same color as his.
He liked her patched jeans and her holey Chuck Taylor tennis shoes.
He liked her brown eyes that looked deep inside of him.
Johns Island is one of the barrier islands around Charleston.
There are two main roads on the island, Maybank Highway and Bohicket Road.
The island is between the Charleston Harbor and the Stono and Folly Rivers.
It used to be covered in farmland, but now there are a few residential neighborhoods around the old farms.
It has a small-town, rural feel.
The Barrier Island Free Medical Clinic is an old cottage painted pea green.
It faces the Maybank Highway.
The two lane Maybank Highway runs past the clinic, just a stones throw from it’s front door.
At the back of the clinic there is a thicket of trees and 80 acres the Smith’s use to grow produce.
From the clinic’s back door, you can look out across the land at the peach trees and tomato fields.
It’s so beautiful in the spring and summer, the soil brown and colorful with peaches and tomatoes growing on it.
Looking out the door, Dr. Maria could see the migrant workers moving across the trees and plants, picking peaches and tomatoes.
She was thinking about Little Salt’s condition.
He worked beside his family during the day and played with the other migrant kids in the evening, never speaking a single word.
At night he read by the light of a single bulb hanging from a cord running into the dilapidated bus that served as his family’s house behind the Smith’s house.
In the fall, he and his family packed all of their belongings and boarded a migrant bus headed down to Florida for winter work.
Dr. Maria studied Little Salt’s condition for the whole spring and summer before he left.
She wanted to help him, to give him the gift of language.
“Why are you spending so much time and effort on one migrant kid?” her colleagues asked her.
“Aren’t there enough people to help.”
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