Rural Doctoring
Trip Start
Aug 10, 2007
1
14
16
Trip End
Oct 15, 2007
Cancha Cancha,
Peru
Friday, September 14, 2007
We got to the top and were presented with this tiny little collection of houses surrounded by fences that kind of made it look like a mediaevil place. We toddled over to the school which is where we were to set up. It turned out that we were over 2 hours late (god knows how we were supposed to make it there by 8am when it was 2 hours by bus then a 3 hour walk and we left at 4am...) so none of the woman who were supposed to get injections were there. They were going to come back at lunch time. Our group got split up during the hike up and while we waited for the others we played with the kids from the school. There were about 20 of them, apparently they were all from just 2 families, yet they all looked about the same age. Most of the local kids dont go to school, they have to work farming with their families. The kids were all really cute, we gave them some of the snacks we'd bought as they all looked like they never ate a square meal in their lives. We also blew up medical gloves to give them as toys, they loved that! When the otehrs got there we started doing health checks on the kids. It was not easy as the kids only spoke Quecha. i had bought a Quecha phrasebook (ironic as quecha is an unwritten language) but eitehr i was hopeless at the phonetic pronunciation or they were too shy to answer me. We just checked them over and tried to persuade them to tell us if they had a cough, or diarrhoea or something, then dished out whatever meds seemed most suitable. Since we only had cirprofloxacin (for urine infeections or gastrointestinal infections) and amoxicillin (for everything else) there want much choice really. We guessed that all the kids had parasites (nearly everone in Peru does) so we formed them in a line and poured antiparastic medicine down their throats. The kids were not particularly keen to drink it (unsurprisingly) and had to be coaxed into swallowing it. I dont even know the spanish for swallow it please let alone in qechua.
Eventually we worked our way through all the kids. It got a bit scary when we found a kid with signs suggestive of hepatitis or something equally serious. We decided that we had no idea what to do with him, so we gave him some antibiotics and antiparastics and said if he wasnt better soon that his parents should take him to hospital. That is not something to be said lightly as it would take hours and cost them an awful lot of money they clearly didnt have (these people lived on potatoes and fish and reared llamas and alpacas..thats it).
After doing the kids we went on to the women who had been gradually wandering down from the surrounding hillsides. Nearly all of them had signs suggestive of severe urinary infections so we gave them all the cipro we had. Clare and Helen helped one of the nurses do smears on some of the women in another room, on school tables, with kids wandering in and out). We then stopped for lunch (those most of it went to the kids) then the teacher presented us with freshly caught trout from the river that runs through the village and boiled potatoes. It was very nice, but we'd just eaten so we had a bit then shared out the rest among the kids. It was then time to go, as we had another 3 hour walk back down the mountain and then the drive back. It turned out we werent to give the contraceptive injections as they wouldnt be able to co-ordiante getting back to the village 3 months on to get the next doses.
Thats about it for what we did in the random little village near Cancha Cancha. We stopped there on the way back to see anotehr couple of kids, and I had to put my patchy dermatology knowledge to the test (luckily we had a cream that will treat any dermatology condition so it was all good). It was an amazing experience, we really were making a difference to these people, even if it was just giving them something to eat. We were quite a way outof our depth a lot of the time, but together we muddled through and hopefully helped out, at least for a little while, as the kids will no doubt get their parasties back, the women will get their infections back from their husbands and everyone is so malnourished they have no immune system and will catch all sorts from us. It was fun to be a real doctor for a day too!
