Kiteni? Where is that?
Trip Start
Aug 10, 2007
1
15
16
Trip End
Oct 15, 2007
Kiteni,
Peru
Friday, September 21, 2007
We arrived to Kiteni at about 12.30am, and went to look for a hostal. The one Sabina tried first was full, so we ended up in a dump of a place. Luckily we were so tired we didnt care what it was, but int he morning we werent thrilled. Each room was the size of a cupboard, mine had a bed, a window that overlooked the main road out of the place, and a small stool. The bed had ants in it. The mosquito netting was worse than useless. There was no water in the hostal at all. We were up on the roof. It was not a pleasant place.
We went to get breakfast, then to the hospital (please bear in mind this was by now a saturday morning...I dont think ive ever been to a placement on a saturday before). It was easy to find since the whole town was made up of one street. The hospital is only a year old, and it is rather large for such a small place. It has a few consulting rooms, 2 wards, a treatment room, an labour suite, a dental room (but no dentist at the moment) a pharmaacy and a nurses consulting room, plus a little lab and some offices out the back. We met all the staff, they were lovely, very welcoming, but rather depsairing at particularly Tom and my lack of comprhension of there rapid spanish. (its not my fault, they all speak sooo fast and at a whisper, I wouldnt get it if they spoke like that in English). Its amazing, all the health posts around theri communicate by CB radio...even though you can get internet there let alone phone lines...We had a look around the lab, and were shown how they test for various nasties like malaria, yellow fever and bartonellosis. All these test are free to anyone as they health ministry is very focused on trying to prevent them. They publish leaflets, do free vaccines for yellow fever if you are from the right areas and get the staff to do very comprehensive recording of cases etc. I was very impressed. they then said go with this guy, who i thought was a doctor but it turns out he was an insect specialist..odd. He took us to this tiny place called Selva Alegre (happy jungle!) where we had to run the health clinic. Luckily there were only a few patients, but one of them made us look stupid by lying about his sypmtoms to us so we thought he was dying of tuberculosis or god knows what, and hed acutally pulled a muscle. We were hanging around waiting for a taxi, when the teacher of the school came over (it was next to the health centre) and said come and judge this competition for us. It turned out to be the miss primavera (spring) beauty contest for the girls, and as we were such a novelty we were to be the judges. We managed topick the only girls whos parent s had turned up as the winner which was nice. A very random experinece, sitting in our white coats on kids chairs in the jungle eating cups of jelly and judging a kids beauty contest...
Whe we got back we moved hostals to one immediatly opposite the hospital (the other was 2 mins walk away, so far!) the cheeky bastard running the shite one charged us 15soles instead of 10 like hed said when the Peruvian was with us...anyway the new hostal was not great, but at least it had water. We were all sharing a room which was ok. I managed to elctrocute myself on the light switch that was hagning off the wall. The showers were in the toilet room, and were cold (naturally) and just taps but we were digusitng after 2 days in the jungle with now washing so we didnt care. Every bloke there (it was all blokes who work at the gas works nearby) was revolting, never flushed the loo and hacked plhegm all the time, repulsive. Oh well it was only for a few days. Also the whole town was grubby, including the restaurants. We ate out a few times (you dont get a choice, they have a set 2 courses and you eat that or go hungry) and the food was not great. it was always meat and rice, often with fried plantain which i hate. And soup with odd bits of meat floating in it. It amazing what i can put up with and be relatively content...acutally it was fun being the only gringos to have visited the town in over a year. People pointed to us in the street, and followed us, and one mum tried to get her kid to stop crying by telling her to look at the gringos! We quickly swapped ot this ladys house where shed cook us whatever we wanted, but it always came with plain white rice and fried plantains, yummy!
Other stuff we did - saw a guy who'd been bitten by a vampire bat in his kitchen (mum you were right about the rabies jabs), saw a lady give birth (she'd been rushed by ambulance from ivochote 2 hours away as shed had prolonged labour) the baby was a little girl she was very cute, met a french doctor from Medicos del mundio (the spanish version of medicins sans frontiers), it was funny i tried to speak to her in french, but neither of us could remember any so we spoke in Spanglish instead and we all went in their truck to some random places to look at their health centres. the driver got lost and we nearly drove off the side of a cliff a few times...fun though! We saw lots of different illness, from typhoid fever to leishmaniasis (that evetually makes your nose collapse). One chap with that also couldnt move his arm. the nusre said it was because hed been bitten by a donkey, we didnt have the heart to explain it was becuase hed had a stroke...
Thats quite enough about Kiteni...I shall now go back and write about Quillabamba...
