I'm just back from 11 days away (only 11 days? felt like much longer). This was a trip back to the communities up the Onzole river, this time with a "team" and the purpose was to hold medical clinics. A group came from Canada and together with some of us from Guayaquil and Playas, we were 16 or so - 4 nurses, 1 doctor, some translators, and assorted helpers and administrators. Most of us met up in Quito on Tuesday, and at 11:30 that night all climbed into a van, with every nook and cranny filled with suitcases and bags full of medical supplies, and headed off into the night. 6 bumpy, uncomfortable, carsick (not me - I took 2 gravol and never felt a thing!) hours later, arrived at the edge of the river to wait for the canoes that would take us into the interior to the riverside community of Santo Domingo. That part of the trip was relatively quick this time, the water was high thanks to lots of rain, so we made it in about 3 hours. Last time I was there in December the river was so low it took us 5 hours! We had a couple of days to put in before the clinics could get underway, we arrived just as the entire community went into party mode, it was a huge fiesta to celebrate the founding of the town. It is a very big deal. Parades, pageants, soccer games, fireworks, and.....music. Or should I say MUSIC. Oh my. 2 years ago when I visited for the first time there was no electricity. And it was peaceful, when night fell, we lit candles and listened to the quiet. Just the many jungle insects to be heard. And you could hang out the window and see thousands of stars and almost as many fireflies. But then electricity came in, and changed everything. Now there are speakers as big as your car, and they were blasting at top volume, all day, and all night. ALL night. We could hear that music everywhere we went. Even way downriver, we went in the canoe one afternoon to visit the "finca" (kind of a farm) of a man from the village, and climbed up the hill where we got a wonderful view, and heard....yes, there it was - the music from Santo Domingo!! Ah yes, Latin America. It carried on pretty much ceaselessly until Monday morning. The North Americans got just a little tetchy!
But it was sort of fun to hang out with the people and be a part of the celebrations, even if our hearts weren't in it quite like theirs were.
We finally got our clinics underway on Saturday morning, packed ourselves and some supplies into the canoe and went to spend the day in the village of Colón, 20 minutes upriver. In a rather small cement building we set up a registration area, a preliminary assessment room, another assessment room, and a pharmacy. And that day were able to see about 60 or 70 people, in a clinic which by the end of the afternoon felt very much like a sauna. But by the time we left, it was raining, a torrential tropical downpour, a specialty in that part of Ecuador. We had to drag all our stuff down the 144 stairs on that hill, load the canoe, and put our wet miserable selves into the canoe and head for home in the dark. But, we did cool off.
The next day we went to church in Santo Domingo, then straight off to Zancudo, 20 minutes downriver, and set up in the school, where we had more space, and more air, and it all went much more smoothly.
I have a sight stashed in my memory from the trip home that evening. Once again we set off after dark, but this time it wasn't raining so I didn't have my head down and could see something special. And all the way along, in the trees beside the river, the whole way home, there were fireflies. Dozens of them, flashing high in the trees and low near us. Such a magical sight,I'll always carry the memory of those little twinkling lights along the river.
The following 3 days were spent in Santo Domingo, holding clinics in the school there. We were able to see more than 100 people, men, women, children, babies, elderly folks who had no idea eactly how old they were (not something they ever felt the need to keep track of!). Part of what we did was annual assessments on all the Compassion sponsored kids in the schools, they were very time consuming, but we were happy to see that these kids are basically quite healhy. We saw many assorted skin infections, most kids and adults had parasitic infections, there were pregnant 15 year olds, people with problems stemming from old serious injuries that were never treated properly or sometimes not at all. Cataracts, sore backs, headaches, the list goes on. I saw so many people with health problems related to issues that we almost never saw in North Burlington Medical Centre! Machete wounds - never. Sore backs from carrying water up a steep riverbank to your home, from bending over doing your laundry in the river, wielding a machete on your finca every day. And the skin and parasite infections. It's a very different world there, even to the world I live in here in Guayaquil, a world apart from southern Ontario. We were able to help many, some we had to say, Sorry, I'm afraid there's nothing we can do to help. We worked from 8am until dark on our last day there, we didn't want to have to turn anyone away who needed attention. And everyone was seen, and treated as best we could with limited facilities.
I had what for me was a bit of a disaster, on my second day there my good camera broke, for no good reason. Thankfully I had put in my little pocket one, so I had that, but had to use it very sparingly, as it charges on the computer. None of those in those villages. But I was able to get a reasonable number of photos. I've posted them, link below:
http://picasaweb.google.ca/heathermoore21/OnzoleClinics?authkey=Gv1sRgCPvJ58uxxJmdbg&feat=directlink
