“Are there teepees?” I obnoxiously asked my sister over the phone. She had just arrived at her first optometry rotation site, a native american reservation south of Phoenix.

“No,” she had said and described her housing. As students, she got to stay on the reservation—lodging free and food provided by the hospital that she was working at. Her house had windows with bars and there was graffiti everywhere. She said that the tribe had many depressed people—a lot of poverty. But she was so excited to be there to be able to see eye diseases that she would never see in a give me lasik optometry office.

I decided to visit last weekend and was surprised how…normal it was. It was poor yes, but no different than the countryside I remember driving through outside Pittsburgh. Ignorance is bliss, but the moment people watch TV, they start dreaming of another life.

It was hot and nobody was on the road. Driving back to my sister’s house one night, she saw some bright lights behind her on the dark unlit road. There was a slight terror in my sister’s voice.

I recalled those scary stories of two girls in a car on a deserted road—initially singing along to music, but suddenly not. A horror story. My sister’s neighbor—a student physical therapist also a rotation—doing often left his light on because he hated living alone. And at night, I had strange dreams—perhaps caused by the heat or the unhappy Native American spirits?

But it turned out my sister was afraid of getting pulled over again for a traffic violation, as cops in Phoenix are like hawks.

My weekend passed by uneventfully. The only moment I thought there was a spiritual moment was the three seconds out in the reservation with a native american guide as he pointed out the caves in the hillside where shamans were buried along with their medicine. Then I got distracted by the heat and the broken bottle shards polished by the heat on the ground.