This morning when we got to Pancho Mateo, there was no electricity again. We set up the room and opened at 9:45. Today, all of the patients were walk-in; there were no appointments. A lot of them came in complaining of the “gripe,” a cold. At times there were tons of kids running around and yelling. Some of them weren’t wearing much clothing. Mothers were as young as 17, many were 18 or 20 with 2-4 year olds. It’s also not taboo to breast feed in public here. I’ve seen a lot of boobs this week.
Again, I worked triage and wound up having to send a lot of women to the pharmacy area so they could get urinary analysis done. Most of these women had urinary track infections, some of which were really bad. One young guy, I think he was 20, came in with a “bump” on his groin. He actually brought a dictionary (I think it was Creole-English) to point to the word bump. It turned out that he didn’t really have anything wrong with him.
One very interesting couple came in today. The man was in his forties and was blind. His wife was 33 and mute. They have to work together to get anything done.
It was swelteringly hot today – absolutely horrible. Finally a little after lunch, the lights (we only used the fans) came on, which helped a lot.
Our day ended early, at around 3:30, because we had run out of medications and patients were dwindling. We were also disgusting by that time because of sweat. Our group took some pictures out in front of the church before leaving and played around with some of the local children.
That night we all came back to Tubagua for dinner, sautéed eggplant, fried plantains, salad and avocado followed by rice pudding. Then the HHI group had an impromptu dance party.
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