Laura and Friends

Last Thursday Laura Grabau, a UK student who is studying in Quito for the semester, came to Santo Domingo with three other US college students to volunteer at the clinic and CRN during their spring break. The Hombro clinic was closed for Good Friday, so the six of us gave the reception and waiting area a new coat of paint and some of the girls got started on setting up a better filing system for patient charts. By the time the students leave tomorrow this latter job will be complete - a huge accomplishment which would have taken the staff weeks or months to get done. The picture shows Rich and the workers after the painting was finished, all holding their "good patient" award stickers. Laura is furthest on the left.

We took the group out to the Tsachila festival (previous post) and to the Easter vigil service at the Agnus Dei monastic community, a liturgy beginning with the traditional fire at 3:30 a.m.(!) None of the girls is Catholic, but they will never forget this Easter, I am sure.

Tsachila Indians

The Tsachilas, a community of Colorado Indians (from whom Santo Domingo de los Colorados got its name), had their annual festival this past weekend in Chiguilpe, a pueblo on the outskirts of the city. The Hombro clinic may start sending a medical team out to the community, whose people are among the poorest of the poor here. Rich and I took the bus out with our four house guests and spent a few hours sampling the food (we took a pass on the grilled grubs, though a couple of the college girls tried them), looking at handicrafts made from seeds and wood and cotton, and watching the entertainment - music and dancing and a drama about global warming....a sad irony that this society which has left no footprint at all on the earth should have to be concerned about this travesty. The pictures above are of two Tsachila girls, two American men (Rich and Trent Blair, a Peace Corps volunteer from South Dakota who has been working with the Tsachilas) and a group competing for "best dressed Tsachila". Their red hats are actually their hair, which they coat with a substance made from the red achiote seed.

Follow ups

Here's a new picture of Luis, taken last week, a little more than two weeks after the picture I posted last week. He has made great progress, though he still has a ways to go. This week, due to school matriculation for the older kids and the Holy Week holiday, Lucia is not at the Center.

Rich and Corrinne requested a follow-up on Daisy. I'm sorry to say that I don't have any recent info about her. We went back to the family home several weeks ago to check on her; she had gotten bigger and looked very different, but we didn't have a scale so I don't know what she weighed, and the mother has not brought her back to the clinic to be re-weighed. In spite of the social worker's threatening to remove the child from the home if the mother didn't bring the baby in, the fact is that it's a terrible burden on this mother to come back with any regularity--more than a two-hour bus ride each way at a total cost of $5, which the family can ill afford, plus five other children at home. One of these days the social worker will go back out.

Lucia y Luis

For the last two weeks I have been helping out with Luis, a now three-month-old baby who weighed about four pounds when he was born and hardly gained a thing in his first month at home. So he spent 3 weeks in the hospital and then came to CRN. When I first met his mother she was sitting on the edge of the bed with tears running down her cheeks, despondent over her situation - missing her other children who were at home, the house she shares with a sister and brother-in-law and their children. She said that her sister doesn't love her (Lucia's) children, and the father of the baby "se fue" (is gone, presumably for good); she obviously was feeling hopeless. I took a picture during the first week. You might be able to see Luis's fuzzy forehead. This black fuzz is a common sign of malnutrition. (Sorry about the orientation; I should have posted it vertically but I can't change it.)

Now the fuzz has almost disappeared. Luis is still terribly floppy, but his eyes are bright and he's begun to make baby sounds and follow my keys when I move them across his field of vision. And he's got a smile like a jack-o-lantern!! His mother's spirits have changed completely, so much so that it's obvious she was suffering from severe depression. I'm working on a follow-up picture to post.

Leap Day

The strangeness of February 29 makes it a good time, I suppose, for me to return to the work of reporting on our activities here in Ecuador. Our return to the US for the Christmas holidays proved to be something of an obstacle to my developing sense of belonging here, I'm afraid. It set back the Spanish somewhat. (Of course we COULD have spoken Spanish every day for an hour or so with Danny and Cristina Oviedo, who visited us from their temporary home in Florida, but we were charitable and helped them with their English.) And since at least for me, communicating with people is paramount to feeling at home, the month away slowed me down.

But in the last few days I have realized that I'm understanding the mothers at CRN better than I ever have (still not completely), so I feel that I'm back in the saddle. And it only took six weeks!

Three things from today are worth commenting on. Those of you who were in 4-H will doubtless remember "demonstrations", those little presentations each member did to show how to make something in the kitchen (I remember doing humble stuff like tuna salad, but Carroll and Alice Holder did some kind of amazing cupcake-decorating thing that involved mirrors and palindromic names like Sis and Otto). In a little conversation this afternoon a few of the mothers expressed enthusiasm for being shown how to prepare nutritious food. (One would think that such sessions would already be a part of a program such as CRN's, but they're not). So starting next week we're going to begin demonstrations.

I accompanied the CRN social workers on a visit to check the progress of a child who came to the Center for a period of time a while back. The home is in a neighborhood of mostly stick houses that have been built on top of a former dump site. The baby is still "hinchado" (swollen, a sign of excess water retention and malnutrition) and will be coming back to the Center with the mom and a couple of siblings starting Monday. They (family of 8, I believe) live in a place with an uneven dirt floor, one large room with two double beds and a stovetop/dish area, and a curtained-off space where a very decrepit-looking grandfather was lying flat on his back, asleep & wheezing, on a wooden bench with no cushioning or bedding of any sort. There was one other room: the "store". Like way too many of their neighbors in this little forsaken neighborhood, they had a few bagged snacks for sale, maybe 10 or 20 items. I am really curious what force is at work making such families invest their scarcest of resources in trying to sell stuff to other people. It seems impossible to me that these enterprises produce income, and I am planning to look into the matter and see what's going on.

I finished up the day hanging out laundry upstairs on the terrace. This is the warm rainy season in Santo Domingo, and oftentimes it's impossible to get clothes truly dry. But today there was a nice breeze, so we're in luck. In these days of worrying about global warming and sustainable lifestyles, it's a wonderful and simple thing to hang clothes on a line.

Building Houses

During the week of January 27 - February 3 I had a chance to do a little re-bar work and some hole digging with a Habitat for Humanity group from Lexington! The delegation from Christ the King cathedral excavated and did foundation work for a house a few kilometers from where Rich and I are living. The twelve or so workers were an inspiration - working from 7:30 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. for five days straight, performing some really heavy-duty labor while dealing with rain, mud, bugs and stomach issues. Four members of the team were medical professionals, and on Friday afternoon I took them on a brief tour of the Hombro-a-Hombro clinic, for which the cathedral parish has been providing significant financial support.

A different building effort, in the neighborhoods served by the Hombro clinic, took place the following week, sponsored by a university in Quito. About 50 Ecuadorean college students camped out in the Julio Jaramillo high school (high schoolers were on vacation), and worked for six days putting up four houses. These houses probably won't last as long as the Habitat-built concrete block house; construction materials consisted of cane posts and underpinnings with a thin concrete overlay. The Oviedos' son Andres was a part of this team, and we went to visit the site with Leonardo and Marcita, who were clearly proud of their son's efforts; this type of project was unheard of when they were his age.

Jemina the dentist; Rich lectures en español

Last week Rich took some photos of Gemina the dentist and her patients to send to Lilian Ranseen, who is doing a toothbrush-collecting project with Veterans Park elementary school. Part of Jemina's work is being supported by Jubileo. In examining the students at four schools in the Hombro clinic service area, staff have found a terribly high level of dental caries and/or need for extractions (more than 65%). Jemina spent six years living in Israel; that's where she met her Ecuadorean husband Jaime! She is very devoted to her patients and her work, and looking forward to implementing a prophylactic program using dental sealants which are being purchased by Jubileo and Hombro jointly.

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Rich has spoken at lots of pediatrics conferences, but on January 30th, his two talks at Voz Andes hospital in Quito represented a big first: he gave both "charlas" in Spanish!! In retrospect, maybe this challenge was a bit premature for the level of fluency he has attained, but he took it on, and due to intense effort, he did himself proud. He basically read the papers, which he had written first in English, then translated, then corrected with the input of several native speakers, then rehearsed many times. His preparation paid off in a polished performance. The only sign that he wasn't totally at ease was the amount of movement in the laser pointer; rather than hitting a particular point on the projected image, it would just sort of wander around the intended area. (I don't know if anybody but me knew that the instability was due to trembling!) He fielded questions from the audience well enough that he received the ultimate compliment from a participant who approached him afterward to discuss something - the person thought Rich was a doctor from Brazil!! (i.e., not a gringo).

UK Delegation

Last week Dr. Tom Young brought a group of UK faculty down to review things at the clinic and investigate possibilities for collaboration between various UK departments (nursing, pharmacy, social work, public health, education, family practice) and their counterparts here at the Catholic University of Santo Domingo. They came on Tuesday afternoon and were gone by Thursday afternoon, so it was a whirlwind. The group met with the bishop and leaders from FASCA (Fundacion Accion Social Caritas - like Catholic Social Services) and various individuals met with faculty at PUCE (Pontifical Universidad Catolica de Ecuador). A delegation visited a nearby community of Tsachila indians, one of the tribes of the Colorados after whom the city is named (Santo Domingo de los Colorados); there is some discussion of sending a doctor and/or nurse to this tiny pueblo which currently has very few medical services.

We had two nice dinners, one of which featured extemporaneous entertainment from the two guitar-playing clinic doctors. Rich did himself proud, considering how long it had been since he´d played much guitar.....he had had just enough wine to loosen up his fingers, I guess.... He was commanded to perform after Cristian (who has entertained professionally in the past) sang a few heart-wrenching trova (love songs).

The other dinner was a thanksgiving cena, after which the group came over to the Oviedos´place and we (Rich and I and Amarilys, the peace corps volunteer who lives next door to us) served dessert - apple pie and cookies.

This three-day event was a lot of fun, and a welcome break from our daily struggle to communicate with the world in another language. Two of the UK folks were fluent in Spanish, a fact that served the group very well, but the rest spoke exclusively English; I´d forgotten how fast I can talk!

When they left I was a little homesick, but also felt a renewed enthusiasm for the work that can be done here.