Jonathan: La clinica

So, today was the first day at the clinic. We didn't actually see any patients or anything, but we spent the whole day there... The morning was spent taking a tour of the barrios (neighborhoods/slums) where the patients live. That was quite an experience. A good one, though. Most of their houses were made out of corrugated metal and jam-packed together. Apparently each house normally has somewhere between 5 and 10 kids. We saw lots and lots of kids on the tour. Very few parents, though. Since Libby got to put all the pictures in the last entry, I beat her to it this time.

There were just a ton of little houses crammed together on this huge hill. The sanitation was terrible, there was only semi-pirated electricity, and apparently crime was rampant. Before going on the walking tour, they instructed us to take nothing with us but our clothes. We almost didn’t even take cameras... and when we did, we were instructed to keep them mostly out-of-sight and hold them close. One thing they told us that I found interesting (though sad, I suppose) is that a fairly common thing in one area we saw was to have little houses that were like bars, only instead of alcohol, people bought and did drugs there. Oh, and there was litter everywhere. Lots of places where they were burning their trash. I suppose if no one’s going to pick it up for you, and you don’t have any transportation, you have to do something with it.

Another interesting thing was the divisions within the barrio. There were little paths and roads that, as we were told, very clearly divided different areas - safe ones from dangerous ones, poor ones from even more poor ones, ones with water to ones without. They all looked pretty much the same to me. So, I suppose you have to be quite familiar with the place in order to not get yourself into trouble by going into the wrong place.

We spent the afternoon at the clinic itself...

We unpacked most of the donations that we had brought, but ran out of time before the day was up. We've got a lot of work to to, organizing things and such... Some classmates even want to convert a semi-open room in the back of the building to a fully-furnished exam room. We'll see if we have the time and resources for that.

Libby and I wandered when we got home. Had a little adventure with conversions. It wasn't until after our first trip to the ATM (and then two stores) that we remembered that $40=20,000 colones, not the 2,000 that we got the first time around. Oops.

I'd better finish for now so that we can eat dinner before a group meeting tonight at our house to discuss weekend plans...

Jonathan