Working. Finally.

     Man, weeks here feel like months. So much has happened over the past four days it’s hard to know where to start.

Katie and I started working this week which has been tough but also a real blessing. It feels good to be doing something finally. Trying to learn Spanish and work on building relationships here in Chimbote has been a job in itself but it’s nice to be earning my keep.

On Monday I shadowed Katie at her job with Hospice which is a program that takes care of terminally sick patients. She’s working with the part of the organization that does home health visits for people who are homebound. Essentially, wound care.

            Now, I just want to say for the record, I didn’t think I was a squeamish person when it comes to bodily functions. Blood? Guts? Bodily fluids? No prob.

           

Yeah right.

            Apparently in the U.S. a person who is bed-bound needs to be turned and attended to every couple of ours. Here, where many people can’t afford fulltime care, and also can’t do it themselves, the patients are left lying in the same position for hours, sometimes days. This causes a decrease in circulation in some places which eventually causes the skin to die.

            So there I was, standing next to Katie and her partner Maria, peering over the bed of a screaming elderly woman with a sore so deep I could see her thigh bone. It was interesting, but also really painful to watch. I heard the snap of Katie’s latex gloves as she grabbed a piece of iodine soaked gauze and went to town. She was definitely in her element.

            To all those in the medical profession: much respect.

           

            On Tuesday I started my job (which luckily doesn’t require me to wipe or suction anything). I’m down here in Peru representing Women’s Global Connection, but before I can move forward with that, I’ll need to get to know the people of Cambio Puente better. Working with the nutrition project has given me a huge jumpstart in that regard. I don’t know how I would be trying to meet people if I hadn’t been given the opportunity to work with Sembrando Infancil. 

           

            As it turns out, I was wrong about a few things. Cambio Puente actually has around 5,000 people, not 1,500. Of those 5,000, 10% are children. For the entire CP community, guess how many clinics there are?

            One.

            One clinic with a team of about 10 or 12 people.

            Also, what Sister Juanita translated as fruit Chupetas (fruit-pops) actually turned out to be “Chispitas” or sprinkles. A lot of the kids of CP are anemic, which means they don’t get enough iron. There’s not a lot of red meat here, and there also isn’t a lot of consumption of vegetables that are high in iron, like spinach and broccoli.

            So “Chispitas” is the brand name for a little packet of iron supplement that we mix with a mashed piece of banana and give to the kids.

         

       There are about 300 kids participating in the project. CP is therefore divided into about 8 sectors, and each sector has one or two Community Agents (members of the community that have dedicated there time and there homes to the project.) They are all leaders in the community and I believe that in the future they will be a strong group for a WGC type project. 

            In the morning we go to a C.A.’s house and the kids from their sector come to take their “Chispitas” or a liquid dose of Phosphorus Sulfate(?) for kids who have a more extreme case of anemia. 

            Once a month we will do a height and weight measurement to check their progress. If they are having weight problems that could mean that they were either sick or are suffering from short-term malnourishment. If there is a problem with the height-to-age ration, it means that they are underdeveloped and suffering from a more long term form of malnourishment.

            So there are three categories: Healthy, At Risk, and Chronic Malnourishment. Obviously the goal is to get all the kids to Healthy status, but that requires a lot of time, education and a lot of undoing of established societal thought patterns.

            Sembrando is just beginning its second year, and before they came many women hadn’t heard of the food pyramid before. Many had no idea that things like carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins and minerals existed.

Ideas we take for granted and that have a real impact on our health. For them, good nutrition meant having enough to eat. The concept of an obese child being malnourished, for example, is something that is difficult for them to understand. A balanced meal to them would be white rice, potatoes and chicken. Thinking about it, I’m sure this is a problem in the U.S. as well.

            Overall, this week has been really good. I met a lot of new people and at the end of the day I have the satisfaction of knowing that I’ve accomplished something.

            A volunteer named Cathleen who is working for Catholic Medical Mission Board has helped me out a lot over that past week in terms of translating, showing me the ropes and sharing what she knows about the population in CP. This was her last week at work though because her year of service is up which is bummer. I’m really going to be on my on now. I’m going back out to CP Saturday afternoon with the program, the first time without Cathleen. So, we’ll see how that goes.

In other words, we’ll see much I can mangle the Spanish language.