Week 5

On Tuesday I went with another trainee and our health facilitator on a house visit. We have been working with a satellite health center, and there was a woman who came in with he daughter last week for a basic check-up, because the daughter has been suffering from long boughts of diarrhea and seems to have continuous health problems (anemia, probably because she doesn’t keep food in her system long enough to absorb the nutrients). The three of us hiked up a mountain made of dirt and rocks to get to this house, which was the last house, practically on the summit, and don’t even begin to think that there are roads to get up there. We were climbing over rocks and hiking up this gulley that was the result of a mud/rockslide during the rainy season years ago (which we later found out is what most people use from a bathroom). As we got close, the stray dogs started getting protective – they can smell gringos from a mile away. The mom was nice, and we talked for a while, and because she doesn’t have a bathroom or latrine, she uses a public outhouse type thing a little ways away on the mountain. We made a few suggestions about how to have secure water with which she could wash her and her daughter’s hands closer to the bathroom, because kids are always sticking hands in their mouths and stuff, and also suggestions about how to ration and keep her water clean (she gets water every 4 days and keeps it in a large bucket outside). It was cool because she was really receptive to our suggestions and said we had given her new information with which to try to take better care of the health of her daughter. Who knows if it will be implemented, but it made us feel like we had actually done something.

Next week I’m going for a week to the department of La Libertad (In which is the city of Trujillo) for Field Based Training. There is a group of 5 of us going together, and the other aspirantes are going to different departments to visit with other volunteers and learn about their projects. I think we get to work on a cocina mejorada (an improved kitchen stove project that cooks faster, thus using less wood, and also has a chimney to take the smoke out of the house to improve respiratory conditions), which should be cool, and I’m not sure what else we will be doing, but I think we get to see some ruins the last day there (maybe at Chan Chan).