Juan Ibarra’s Biography
Excerpted from Healing Journeys: Teaching Medicine, Nurturing Hope
Graduates of the Stanford Medical Youth Science Program are now scattered throughout the world. They have been everywhere from Ghana, to Vietnam, to Fresno, doing everything from building wells, to administering vaccinations, to delivering babies.
Juan Ibarra, who went through SMYSP in the summer of 1990, is a quintessential alumnus: smart, humane, committed to a life of healing. He is stocky and tall, with short black hair and small eyeglasses that lend him the air of an aesthete. Charity and calm radiate from him; he has the countenance of a thoughtful, kind-hearted wrestler, true to the nickname that has stuck with him since the second grade, when he ran with a gang called the Little Stockton Pee Wees: El Osso, or The Bear.
Juan is now a public health specialist in his late twenties. He lives with his sister Sylvia, her husband and their two children in Redwood City, a town on the peninsula south of San Francisco.... Tumult, tragedy and blessings have marked Juan's life.
Juan's family is from a small agrarian community located in the Mexican state of Michoacan, inland from the country's western coast and not too far from the world-famous metropolis of Acapulco. There he was born, the last of the 10 children who lived, to Luis and Aurora Ibarra, on land his family had inhabited for generations.
Long before Juan was born, his father Luis started traveling to the United States, coming into the country seasonally to work under the auspices of an American program begun in the 1940s to recruit cheap Mexican labor. Luis worked in the fields and on the railroads, one of the millions of manual laborers who formed the backbone of California's burgeoning economy. Little by little, he saved and made plans to bring his wife and children to California with him – permanently. Juan was an infant when he took his first trip across the border, and by the time he was 2, the family had migrated north for good, settling first in Chino, where there were strawberry fields forever and plenty of jobs for people with strong backs and humble expectations.
When Juan was 5, the family settled in Stockton, and it was here that he began his official education, in a kindergarten several blocks from his home. Juan grew to love learning, and his first serious mentor became his brother Raoul.
"Raoul is four years older than me, the third youngest. He was very...militant. I can't think of a better word for describing it," says Juan.
Raoul motivated Juan. He would cover the wooden walls of the family's house with math problems for Juan, written out in chalk, and the two would go through them together, with Raoul explaining to his brother how to find the area of a circle or the angle of a triangle. Juan was entranced. By the time Juan was in the fifth grade, Raoul was thinking about college, and he became rigorous. He and Juan set their schedules: after school, they exercised at the YMCA and then they studied. If Juan had any questions as he was doing his homework, Raoul would answer them. When Juan had finished his work, he would stay at his brother's side and read whatever books he could find....
On the night of November 3, 1986, when Juan was in the eighth grade, his family suffered its most terrible blow. The family was still living in Stockton, in a garage that had been converted into a two-room apartment. Juan was sleeping with his brother in one of the two rooms when he awoke to his sister's screaming. He looked at the clock, saw it was around 3 a.m. and thought he had perhaps imagined things, or maybe that he'd heard cats fighting. Then he heard the noise again and realized something was very wrong. "I got a feeling in my body of being frozen, paralyzed," he remembers.
In the other room, a nightmare existed: an intruder had broken in, killed both of Juan's parents and attacked another brother, who was able to get away and out a window to get help....
Talking now about the crime, many years later, Juan says the family never really recovered. The counseling they all went through did not help their grief. "We all lacked the skills to deal with it in an effective manner," says Juan. "I loved my mother so much, and I was so attached to her that I really couldn't comprehend it. We were a very religious family, but my faith" – which had been weak to begin with – "was shaken...."
In his 20s, Juan found a psychologist to work with and also began to open up to friends about what had happened to his family that night. But in the immediate years after the crime, Juan didn't talk to anyone about what happened. "I just put all of my energy into school and disregarded anything else," he remembers....
Juan entered SMYSP in 1990, in the summer after his sophomore year. He remembers the program as a wonderful, surreal experience. "I came to this perfect, serene place where everybody got along, and, for me, it was such an abnormal experience. I had food every day. I mean I could walk downstairs and get food. There was a cook! It was a fantasy land. I felt like I was living in a castle." Any initial feelings of alienation soon wore off. Juan loved the sense that he was meeting others like himself, highly motivated students who wanted to learn more about medicine. "I identified with the people in the program in such a powerful way, in a way that was much stronger than anything I had experienced before," he says. "There were incredible people who had persevered through difficult circumstances, and being together with them in the intimate context of the program was very inspiring. We were all triumphing over something."
Juan spent his summer working in the operating room, and his experiences there and in the "chaotic" emergency room formed the bulk of his daily journal entries, a required part of the program. He wrote about the fear that he experienced, about the shock of realizing how fragile life can be and how people can suffer or in an instant be physically impaired for the rest of their lives. He wrote, too, of how encouraging it was to see all that medicine can do for people in states of shock and trauma.
Over the summer, Juan absorbed the key message of SMYSP: that it is safe to trust the broader world and to embrace the many opportunities that lie within it. When he left the program, it was with a reinforced conviction that he belonged in the health care field....
To learn more about Juan Ibarra's experience in SMYSP and to find out what Juan is doing today, purchase the book Healing Journeys: Teaching Medicine, Nurturing Hope at the Stanford Health Promotion Resource Center. All proceeds from the sale of this book go to funding scholarships for SMYSP graduates. You can also purchase this book at Amazon.com.