Clinic days...

This week has been very eye-opening and I have learned tons!!

On Tuesday, Chelcy and I went with Dr. Moises to Santa Ana. It had rained a lot over this past weekend and the land over here doesn´t take very well to the rain. We took a motor-taxi to Santa Ana but the roads were too muddy for the motor-taxi, so we had to walk a good ways through the mud!! We started going house to house and realized that a lot of people were really sick. The majority of people in this community don´t have running water and use water from this well type of thing. What happened was when it rained, it flooded and washed all the dirt from the roads (which includes all sorts of animal secretions) into where there water is stored! So the whole community didn´t have any clean water. The water was the color of coffee and they have no choice but to drink it anyways. So almost everyone in the community was getting sick. It was so emotionally standing there with these families that literally have no clean water and i couldn´t do anything about it. We sat around one man´s porch as they discussed how they could clean the water. After literally hours of discussion, they figured out that they could borrow this bomb, as they called it, that could get all the dirty water out and they they could clean the tank...It then took another hour to find someone that either had money for gas or gas they would lend to make this bomb thing run. So when we left I think that the problem was in the process to be solved, hopefully. It was so hard to believe that they literally had NO clean water at all!

On Weds, I went to San Blas and met up with Dr. Moises. We did quite a few consults in the morning, mostly babies and some old people. We then headed to the outskirts of San Blas on motorcycle to do house visits for the people that cant make it to the clinic. It was a really rough ride because the roads had been basically wiped away with the rain and it took us quite a while to make it over there. The houses back here were very poor and most of the people who live back there never leave their houses because it´s so far. We started on foot going house to house. All of the people we were checking on were really old and frail. A lot of the women have problems with circulation in their feet and it makes it very hard for them to walk. So I took blood pressures, listened to their lungs, the whole sha-bang. Most of the experience I have is with children so it was good for me to work with the complete opposite side of the spectrum, especially because the sounds are different and you need to look for different things. It´s amazing because these people are so poor and barely have enough to feed themselves, but EVERY house we stopped at gave us glasses of refrescos (fresh juice drinks) and bread. I was so full after the first house, but I had no choice to accept because these people have nothing and were so giving and grateful for us going out to them. It is truly amazing what the doctors do here to treat their paitents, and they don´t make that much money at all. So we walked around in the scorching heat for hours and then head back towards the main part of San Blas. We started stopping at houses and I would do interviews with the women about some medical history and about the importance of Pap Smears. I had made a bunch of poster in the morning about the Pap smear and mamogram project we are having next week. Next Weds and Thursday, Chelcy and I and literally going to do Pap Smears and breast exams all day! I´m really excited but a lot of the women here have never had pap smears and are really scared. So thats why Moises and I had to go around and talk to the women. We answered all of there questions and explains the importance of the exam and exactly how it is going to go down. It was really amazing to be able to talk to these women and educate them on what they can do to maintain their health. When we were visiting one of the houses, the wife was very nervous about the exam and we spent about an hour explaining everything to her. Finally her husband spoke up and told her that he never wants anything to happen to her and that he will go with her to get the exam. He said that he knew she was scared but that he was going to be with her the whole time and hold her hand through out the whole exam so nothing would happen to her. That was one of the sweetest things I´ve heard in such a long time. It was truly amazing to see her husband supporting her so much.

Today was another amazing day! I´m getting really good at giving the kids their injections. They never like it, and usually cry even before I give them to them, which makes me feel really bad. We spent about half of the day in the clinic doing consults and then we made the trek back out to Santa Ana to do some more promoting and interviews about the pap smears. I also spent a long time today talking to Maria Luisa, who seems to manage most of the things in the clinic and the comedor. She explained to me about how everything is funded and it really hit me how much they are struggling. I´m starting to brainstorm ways I can help fundraise for them. They only have enough to pay the doctor for half of the day and that sometimes other organizations will help out and pay for the afternoons. It´s so hard because they are all doing what they can to help people, but they dont even have enough money to get all the meds they need for the pharmacy!

So everyday I learn something new and learn to appreciate life and everything I have even more. I think that everyone needs to see these types of living conditions for themselves. It´s very different seeing things in pictures or on the news and actually spending days in the middle of it.