Last Thursday through Saturday I was able to tag along on a medical brigade with the NGO I'm working with, which took me into the super isolated communities in this mountains. It took 3 hours by Combi (van turned into a little bus) to get to some of these places that are towns of no more than 70 to 100 people. They mostly speak Quechua - very few people speak Spanish. They have no way to get anywhere besides walking (which they will, for endless hours to get to town), live off of what they grow themselves (which is primarily potatoes), and have virtually no access to health care of any kind. They are beautiful people and live in the gorgeous puna (dry high hills). These communities are at 13,000 feet or higher. We would set up our make shift clinic in the school and my job was mostly to take social histories and chief complaint information. It was incredible to hear these people’s stories. Most of the ailments were backaches from hard labor either working in the fields or as porters on the inca trail (the trail tourists can hike fro three days to get up to Macchu Picchu), dental pain, headaches, and “la gripe” – which is anything from a head cold to the flu. In one community we saw quite a bit of alcohol use on the part of the men, and unfortunately that seemed to coinced with a lot of domestic violence. One woman was even suffering from epilepsy, which may have been related to many things – being beaten by her drunk husband, syphilis, cycsticercosis, something related to her drastically low blood pressure – but she had no money to go into town to get a full work up, so there wasn’t really much we could do for her.
But it wasn’t all sad. I took a break when we were in a community called Kelccanka to play soccer with some little boys, but I tried for all of 5 minutes and thought my lungs were going to explode. Damn altitude. Another time, we pulled our two combis over on the side of the road to serve some people working in the fields that couldn’t make it down to the school. The people generously offered us Watia – potatoes cooked in the ground with hot stones – which is their only source of income. It was incredibly generous of them to offer the only thing they had as a thank you for our services. Not to mention how awesome it was to set up a clinic out of two Combis on the side of a mountain.
The campaign was a great introduction to the way the way of life in the Sacred Valley, but also a bit heart breaking. We just kept uncovering more and more problems that need solutions much bigger than I could ever solve and need a lot more buy in from the government, whose support is virtually absent in these communities. Coincidentally I’m reading “Healing of America” which is an exploration of different health systems around the world and how they came to be. It makes me think not only about what would be required to get health care coverage and services to the people out in small communities like Yanamayo compared to what it would take for the United States to finally change to a health care system that also cared for those who don't have access to health care.
Yanamayo
Yanamayo
Little girls in Yanamayo
The Puna on our way to Kelccanka
Watia in Kelccanka
Kelccanka
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