Careful with what you wish

We got up early the next day to set up the clinic the best we could with the supplies we had. The men of the village got up even earlier to go get the rest of our boxes and I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the mules crossing the soccer field with our boxes covered in mud. Time to get to work.

Our team had 3 nurses, one doctor, one psychologist, 3 logisticians, and 1 translator. I was appointed to be the triage nurse, which is something I quite enjoy doing. We started late, since besides the delay of our supplies, we also had a lengthy meeting, were everybody that was present from the tribe wanted to introduce themselves.

Urada has no access to treated water. They use the river, which is clean and nice, but not treated. Therefore I was not surprised to find out that just about all the children I triaged had symptoms of intestinal parasites. I was giving out Albendazol like candy when they came back holding their prescriptions. It surprised me their attitude when taking the meds. I was ready for the usual fit that I see in north American kids whenever they need a Tylenol, but most of them did not make a fuss at all about it. They just took the pill and chewed it after their parents told them to.

The children were so beautiful and sweet. They seemed quite happy and loved. They were not the starved for attention type of children that I had found many times in Brazil. I could tell that these ones lacked a lot of material things (including food), but they did not lack love. My favorite ones were the little babies, who got so upset when I had to get them naked and hang them to be weighted. I must have done that procedure a million times, but the women would always laugh and make jokes in their language whenever I did it. It was quite cute to see them hanging on this grocery-bag kinda device.   

Most people did not speak Spanish at all and understood very little, which made my work twice as hard. Simple questions such as “what is your name” were often met with a blank look. But the most difficult question of all was “how old are you”. Most people simply didn’t know and didn’t care either. Some of them would pull out their ID for me to figure it out for them (when they had one), but a lot of them simply pondered for a while and then gave me some estimated age. I thought how wonderful would it be to grow old and never realize it or really think about how old you actually are. Age is an invention of the modern world, of the busy men running around the rat race with their watches tightly wrapped around their wrist. Here, age didn’t seem to mean anything of importance. I learned something then.

Talking about age, the oldest person I saw was about 60 (looking more like 75). A little old lady that negotiated the narrows steps to climb up the house where we had triage set up. Most people were young, on their 20s or 30s. I thought what the life expectancy would be here. Probably around 50 I would estimate.

Another major problem we discovered, was the lack of registry. Most people did not have any record of birth or of existence. Without that paper, they can not get registered for health insurance either. So one problem leads to the next.

Vaccinations were also severely late and missing. Most children simply did not have a vaccination card, and the ones that did were behind on their schedules.

We saw about 40 people that day. We finished too late, when it was already dark, and therefore I could not go to the river, scared of meeting a snake and not seeing it. Fortunately it rained and a small shower was created from the water coming down the roof. So we bathed with that.

That night something funny happened. You know that saying “careful what you wish..” Well, in one of our meeting we had agreed that it would be nice if we had the mules available 24hrs, in case of an emergency situation or evacuation. Well, that night the 3 mules that live in the village paced around the room where we were sleeping all night long, clunking their feet on the concrete and pounding their tails against the walls. I woke up with the noise and desperately needed to go out to the bathroom. That’s when the paranoia kicked in. What if  there were men with the mules waiting outside for the first victim that gets out. I thought I heard steps. I laid with my eyes open paralyzed on my hammock, thinking what I should do. Should I wake somebody up to go with me to the bathroom? That seemed awfully stupid. I mustered enough courage to lift up my head and look outside. My gaze was met straight on with the mule’s and I jumped on the hammock. Phew… the mule was alone and it was quite happy to go somewhere else when it saw me. I made my way safely to the washroom with no further incidents.

The next day I found out that my colleagues experienced similar fears, so I didn’t feel too embarrassed. Our native translator was quite sure it was the guerrilla invading the village and started to pray. Anyways, moral of the story: careful with what you wish.