First Clinic

Hola a todos.... here is an update about my life in the last week. Sorry that I can't email individually more but life in Peru really doesn't allow for that kind of time :) Last sunday we left for clinic at like five in the morning for a village 30 min. away. Our clinic was held in a 2 room house measuring about 15 ft by 25 ft.... here we had triage, pharmacy and at night it was home. Clinic is so interesting and very high stress. It really opened up opportunity to connect with the locals and see who people are in Peru. We saw some of the poorest of the poor and some very interesting cases. There were issues of sickness, rape, and people with surgeries gone awry because of lack of money(such as the man who now has his intestines hanging in a bag outside of his stomach). It is crazy... in US dollars to do his surgery it would only cost like $800. The price of life here is soooooo different. We worked there for six days seeing approximately 150 people a day, so thus we were crazy busy. People would start lining up at like one in the morning to be able to get one of the 70 tickets for the morning set which began at eight. Because of this sleeping was tough...the line was outside of our clinc building which is where we were sleeping. It is odd to walk out of your "house" in the morning, half out of it, to find a hundred people watching you and stare at you the full 2 blocks to shower and the bathroom. We were really spoiled this trip 'cause the "president" of this town (position lower than a mayor...title is sorta confusing) let us use his shower and bathroom which was at least mostly sanitary and usually enclosed. The living situation of so many here is soooo poor... needless to say we will all come back with strong legs from so many "squat pots" lol. Also, modesty is something that is piece by piece being thrown to the wind, for bathing and bathroom aren't always in the most secluded or modest of situations. I figure they are used to it so it shouldn't be a humungo deal for us, but it is still really hard. While in clinic we got to do a few "jungle surgeries" which are definitely an interesting excitement....nothing to serious, just tumor removals. The language barrier is definintely evident when trying to explain medicines, but we have all learned a few more words and our next clinic (in 3 days...yay) should be a bit better. It was hard for me to do shots, just cause I haven't done a whole lot and am still uncertain about parts of it. All of them are but shots, so you have to be careful of the area and the size of person cause most are really small. Ummm I think that is all for now. It is so hot right now and I really need to go run some errands for our next campaign.... so until next time hope this made enough sense to give you some idea of life in the medical aspect here. Much love, Tara