How far is San Miguel from San Antonio? Not far at all.

The 2006 film Babel, written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, both supernovas of the Mexican cinema, is an intricate psychological drama starring Gael García Bernal, Brad Pitt, Adriana Barraza and Cate Blanchett, a Japanese cast, plus a number of Mexican immigrants playing themselves.

The story travels from Morocco to Japan, Mexico and the United States and accordingly, the dialogue goes back and forth between Japanese; Japanese sign language (a young woman character is deaf mute); Berber (a language spoken in certain parts of Morocco); Spanish and English. We first saw the movie in Mexico with Spanish subtitles, and monolingual Stew couldn’t make heads or tails out of it.

Babel was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Director for González Iñárritu, who also won the Oscar for Best Director for Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015).

Stew and I were not nominated or awarded anything by the Academy then or since, but in 2007 we did visit the Moroccan town of Ouarzazate, one of the locations where Babel was filmed and found the natives still sighing at the mention of Brad Pitt. Yellowed photos and clippings of him adorned the town’s sole restaurant.

All these convolutions aside, Babel‘s core story revolves around the notion of “Six Degrees of Separation,” about how people somehow are six social connections away from each other. Or as some would put it, “it’s a small world we live in.” In Babel, a gifted rifle is the element that connects all the characters and their stories in three different continents.

Back at the hospital in San Antonio where I kept vigil when Stew was operated on for a fractured hip six weeks ago, I had plenty of opportunity to observe the caravan of nurses, doctors, orderlies and physical therapists attending him, and the fascinating ethnic minestrone they represented: Korean, Filipino, Mexican, Black, plus a bubbly Ethiopian woman named Alpha—with a brother back home named Omega—all fussing about at their individual chores, all unfailingly polite. Some Filipino nurses sounded as if they occasionally reverted to their native language, probably because I didn’t understand their English.

Plus a physical therapist named Jesús (Jesse) Rodríguez, a 28-year-old with a beefy build of a former football player, a heavy beard broken by a shy smile, and laser-focused attention as he showed Stew different exercises.

Jesús and we turned out to share a close degree of separation: His mom is Mexican and originally from Los Rodríguez, a none-too-prosperous town of 2,500 residents, no more than ten minutes from our ranch.

She originally lived in Piedras Negras, a border town through which a lot of undocumented immigrants enter the U.S., including Félix who said that on his most recent soujourn in the U.S. he’d crossed the border at a town nearby. Jesús was born and lived in Piedras Negras until he was three and his family moved to Eagle Pass, another border town, where they live now.

(There is no relation between Jesús’s family and whoever settled Los Rodríguez, probably wealthy hacienda owners.)

From such a modest starting point, Jesus went on to Baylor University in Waco, where he received a B.S. in biochemistry, and worked as a volunteer mentoring recent immigrant students, and others considered at-risk because of behavioral issues.

His mother then suffered a vehicle accident that left her unable to work. Watching physical therapists work with his mother, he said, got him interested in the field.

“From that point forward, I realized that is what I wanted to do,” he told me. “To help people improve their quality of life through physical therapy.”

He was accepted at the doctoral program in Physical Therapy at the University of the Incarnate Word, a Catholic institution in San Antonio, and he was in his second clinical rotation at the orthopedic hospital where we met him, until Sept. 9. From there he will move to Austin and a specialized sports physical rehabilitation facility to begin his third and final clinical rotation.

After graduation on Dec. 9, Jesús and a team of volunteer students will spend 13 days in rural communities of Oaxaca as part of a health fair mission. And later that month he plans visit his family in Los Rodriguez.

“Yes, indeed, some way, somehow, we are all connected in this small world in which we live,” he wrote me in an email. While in San Antonio I offered to treat him and his family to lunch at a restaurant in the former Hacienda Landeta, near Los Rodriguez, when he visits for Christmas. Stew and I hope he takes us up on it.

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