Nieve in Ecuador - Rich Letter #2

If you turn right out the front gate of our clinic, right again where the sidewalk ends, and walk carefully four blocks on the muddy road lined by hibiscus bushes up the hill, after a turn or two, you’ll come to Nieve’s house. The first time Mercedes and I visited her, Nieve couldn’t get out of her bed. She could hardly move.

I love doing these house calls with Mercedes, our community nurse. She’s in her element out there and everyone seems to know her and love her. Your patient list has a way of growing when you’re out visiting homes with Mercedes. Recently she recruited me to visit a little girl badly burned on her leg but when we finished with her, 2 or 3 more folks needed a visit. Knowing you are in the neighborhood, people will flag you down and off you go.

Anyway, Nieve is better now, on medication for her severe rheumatoid arthritis, provided through the help of our generous benefactors back home. She now limps on her walker the four blocks to the clinic every week to get her methotrexate shot and have her blood pressure checked. She’s a very positive person, doesn’t complain much about her lot in life. We aren’t able to solve all of her problems, but she’s grateful she can walk again, and so are we. Thanks for making it possible!

Letter from Ecuador #1 (Rich)

June 22, 2008

We got caught in a torrential rain the other day while Cristian, my colleague at the clinic, was driving us home. He’s our young, excellent and hard-working Ecuadorean doctor who sees the adult patients while I see the children. Driving through the rain, he observed good-naturedly that we really weren’t supposed to get rain like this now that summer, theoretically the dry season, had arrived. The passage of the (two) seasons here at the equator, however, is a pretty nebulous concept. Winter and summer are pretty much interchangeable. Winter is warm, humid and rainy, and summer is warm, humid and slightly less rainy. I joked that really the only two seasons in Ecuador were mud and dust and everyone laughed in the usual Ecuadorean way. There is so much here to laugh at, they get pretty good at it; the weather, the water supply, the economy, the crime rate, the corruption and the many unpaved roads being only a few of the possibilities.

Despite it all, or maybe because of it all, Ecuadoreans are hopeful people and our days at the clinic are filled with hope. Rocio, our nurse, and I were talking last week about the unacceptable number of children we are seeing with malnutrition—24 children just in the month of May. We have a supplemental feeding program which keeps most of the kids 6 months to 3 years of age reasonably well-nourished, but still some are falling through the cracks. She thought that organizing group meetings to provide education and support for the families with malnourished children would be a good idea. We’ll also be doing monthly weight and infection checks. Mercedes, our new community outreach nurse, will be visiting the families at home, checking to see whether the family needs food and how the feeding is going. We also have a little money to buy food in emergencies when families are going through rough spots. Hopefully—there’s that hope again—we can start getting these kids back on track nutritionally. Thank you, friends and family back home, for helping to make our hope possible.