So I´m going out of character tonight and I´m going to write about my afterthoughts on my trip before I´ve really given you guys some good blog posts about how its been up until now. Please forgive me. If it really bothers you, you can always close the tab and go on about your life as though this never happened.
Alright so where to begin. As of this morning, I really started to get sad about leaving. I was doing great, then the last two days I´ve been really excited to get away from the itchy legs and the lack of fresh veggies, but today I find myself in a spot of endearment for the area. I´m going to miss the Spanish speaking and forcing myself to have conversations with people just to improve. I find that I can easily form full sentences without much thought. Its great. I was writing in my journal the other day and many of the phrases I was thinking were coming out in Spanish BEFORE English. Tell me that´s not weird.
Guess what else? I´m actually going to miss the God awful Cumbia (sp??) music that kept me up for hours in Mazan as well as a couple of other areas (one particularly long night in Juancho Playa as well). Look it up. Not sure if you can find it, I´ll keep you posted about it once I get back because I have to share this with everyone hah.
I think some of the things I learned down here were insane. Like the total sexist attitudes that still exist here. Woman have so few rights! And girls get pregnant around 14 to 16, although luckily here they then marry their baby-daddy, but since they have no say and there really is no such thing as divorce, often times they get caught up in an abusive relatioship. Its so hard to see that happening and be so powerless to reach out and help. What is one stupid gringo going to do in the three days where she´s out of her element and incapable of fluidly communicating? Yea. Its a helpless situation for me to be in. Which brings us to other helpless situations, the poor pups here. I am too much of a doggie lover to be down here seeing all the dogs. They are in the worst shape sometimes. They are kind of like some farm animals in the states, they are there but nobody really gives a shit about them. I can´t count the number of dogs who were swarming in gnats because they had horrible gashes or ulcers on their skins that were just open. Okay enough of that talk, I won´t get any more in to it in case you all feel the same.
I learned a TON about the health system (or lack thereof) down here in the districts of Mazan and Amazonias. In the villages you go to a Promoter (although you dont have to) which is kind of like going to your 1st year med student daughter. She looks at you and goes, sure you´re sick, you need to see someone. Which means you have to get in your Pechae Pechae (boat) and travel to the village that has your clinic where there is a Technico. These guys are trained for 3 years, I think, after highschool. Depending which one you have, you may have a good chance at getting the right meds or you might not. If you are sick enough, the Technico refers you to the Doctor in Mazan. There is one Doctor.... for the entire area. Something like 5 or 6 thousand people if I remember correctly. You HAVE to be referred for your insurance to cover the cost, but for many villages the trip to the Technico is in the opposite direction of the Doctor, and the Doctor is often up to 6 hours away from your village in the first place. Plus many of the Technicos are proving to be somewhat worthless.
Our goal was to improve the conditions in individual communities by working with the Promoters in both prevention and in triage. We are going to try in the future to stress prevention more, now that we know that triage isn´t going to be overly useful if we are sending people to Health Posts where the Technico is clueless!
My future may or may not include working with one or two of the CU first year students on a woman´s health project during our 4th year down here. I really want to come back and do this, it just depends on how I can formulate something that will fit into my tight 4th year schedule. We´ll see. I would really love to come back and address these woman´s health issues. Diana has been doing some stuff with that too (she´s an RN who moved down here and started working with a handful of the villages on improving their health). Anyhow, any ideas are always appreciated although I think it will be hard for any outsiders to come up with something tangible since there is no good way for me to really explain to you the dynamic of woman in the community here.
Alright enough rambling for the night. Look forward to some more entertaining, and perhaps informational, posts when I return to the states. I fly back tomorrow... in Jersey at 533 am on the 27th.... so crazy!
No comments:
Post a Comment