The driver starts up the car and lets it run to warm it. He says that we have a couple minutes, that gives me time for another cup of coffee. It will be my third but I can’t really wake up. It’s cold and dark outside and the dim yellow light in the kitchen is anything but exhilarating. It’s 5:30 when the car leaves the university driveway in front of my house. We stop and pick the doctors up at the Health Post a few minutes away and everyone teases me for looking so dumpy and worn out. If I didn’t feel so dumpy and worn out I’d try to think of something silly to say so I seem good natured. I didn’t really have it in me, anyway it’s just that morning REALLY hasn’t been my time of day.




I sort of zone out until we get to Coroico to pick up medical supplies a little after 6:00. I get out of the car to stretch my legs when while we wait outside the hospital. The adobe houses and cobblestone streets are totally alive in the pink sunrise. It feels like the light is emanating from inside them somewhere and the sun might as well not even be coming up. It’s the kind of light that has a texture to it, a density that you can almost touch. Bodies moving through it should leave churning wakes behind them and light objects could be suspended in it. The hopefulness from every new beginning in history has been collected and the soupy mass and poured into the valley where it’s so powerful that it might make you excited for a day of picking Coca.
My eyes open up a little bit.




Back on the road toward Santo Domingo I chat with the nurse next to me. She is a recent graduate of the UAC and now a full time employee. Behind us sit a nursing student and the campus doctor who was trained in La Paz. The visit we are going on is part of the campus health extension program, a couple times a week the health professionals and a student or two pack up some basic equipment and go visit one of the many small communities in the area. Santo Domingo has about 60 people and is 30 min from Coroico in the opposite direction as Carmen Pampa. Which means it’s poor and isolated but not at all unreachable. They have electricity, and I think some running water. When one thinks of rural life in a developing country this is what comes to mind, not desolate but anything from comfortable.





We pulled into town and parked on the soccer field. There are about 10 visible houses and a few more back in the woods. The doctors told me we are mostly here for the children and the elderly. They come here once a month and know exactly which houses to go to. The first one has a baby, I think three months old. We weigh it, give it a few vaccines and talk to the mother about basic health stuff. Has your child been sick? been eating regularly? sleeping? The baby is really normal, its weight is right, it’s clean, and it already has the big dark eyes that characterize the kids here. There are two older siblings who peek out from the door of the house. They look good, and only a little surprised to see a blond white person fumbling with their little brother in a baby scale.










In addition to drugs the doctors are here to provide information. To the mothers of young children they explain a new government benefit, all mothers are eligible to receive 120 B’s every other month until their child turns three. This comes in addition to all the other government benefits like the free medical care we are providing and food programs. There is a catch of course; the mother cannot get pregnant again until the child is three years old. In a country where condom use is low and sex ed is less popular than Ice Hockey many of these women could struggle not to get pregnant again. But that’s probably the reason for the incentive in the first place.






Later we visited an old couple, they looked like they should have been retired for 20 years and spend their time eating hard candy or falling asleep to daytime TV. In reality they probably weren’t much over 60 and they were working with their son when we arrived, drying and husking coffee beans. The woman was having trouble walking and said she was always dizzy in the morning. Her blood pressure was okay and the Doctor said she might need more vitamins, which we left for here. She won’t see another health specialist until the ones from the UAC come back in a month. She will be fine but I hope to be coddled a little more than that in my old age.


Some people gave us Avocados or Oranges for coming, they were pretty happy to have had the chance to talk to a DR. even though for the average person the conversation was like five min consumed mostly by pleasantries.






Every time I leave Carmen Pampa I am reminded of how much better things are in this community and in the university than in other parts of rural Bolivia. It’s amazing that a place which seemed so backwards to me for so long could actually be a big step up from other places so close but it’s really true.






Okay, well I miss the US and my friends and family. Don’t be afraid to drop a line and if you don’t hear back it’s just because I’m bien flojo.



LOVE



andy