MIsh Mosh

2/27/09

On Wednesday, I went to do home visits of our pregnant women with one of the midwives, Irlanda. We were able to speak to 11 of them, so felt like a pretty successful day. Plus we got good exercise walking all over the city…even through part of a garbage dump to get to a patient washing her clothes in a stream. We had a goal of speaking to about 40 pregnant women in two weeks and I think we’ve been able to find about 25 total. We haven’t been as successful at speaking to the whole families…it’s just hit or miss whether anyone else is home and wants to talk to us. Anyway, most women seem interested in learning how to make their own suero, so hopefully we’ll get to do some of that next week.

Thursday and Friday this week are the celebration of Carnaval in Julcan. It’s one of the big parties here in the city. The festivities started at 6am with the different barrios in the communities, putting up their palo cilulos – a palo is a stick…so I was expecting some small branches, but these are full grown trees that have all kinds of things hung on them (t-shirts, household appliances, etc). So each tree was lying on the ground in the plaza and it was pretty crazy watching everyone working to get them lifted up and put in the ground. The barrio with the best tree wins a prize.

On my way down to the clinic, I was approached by a family who asked me to come see there sick 3 year old at home. They said he was sent home from the big hospital in Belen and wasn’t doing so well. That’s what I understood but when I got to the clinic the nurse said that she was told that the child was dying and they needed a doctor to see him before he actually died so they wouldn’t have any difficulty getting a death certificate later. So they picked me up on a moto and took me about 15 minutes down hill to the home. I found a tiny very pale boy taking very slow breaths…the mom showed me his CT scan which showed a huge mass in his abdomen and the report stated it was most likely a Wilm’s tumor. The mom said that they had been in Trujillo visiting family and she noticed that his stomach looked big suddenly and when she took him to the hospital they found the mass, but it was too large and advanced for treatment. Kids don’t really get regular physical exams here …so not sure how anyone would’ve picked it up. While I was there examining little Maycol, he died. People here often say that families in the sierra don’t mourn their kids in the same way…I don’t know if that’s true, but this family broke down immediately. It was heartbreaking, I just met the family that morning. After that, I got jolted back to the craziness of Carnaval in Julcan proper.

The clinic was not very busy, b/c most people we’re out celebrating. Most of us went to go see the parade of floats put together by the different barrios. Each barrio has it’s own float and it’s own band…so there were 6 bands playing simulataneously in the plaza. A huge part of carnaval here is people throwing water filled balloons at people. I was for the most part spared any significant hits, but not sure I appreciate this part like Peruvians do. The rest of the day was just one big party in the plaza…people dancing and doing some serious drinking. Later on in the evening, the trees that aren’t in the top three get knocked down and it’s a free for all for the items on the tree (imagine a piñata, but a humongous tree). Our evening ended with a centro de salud outing to one of the discotecas. It was a blast.

The carnaval continued today. Today was pretty much just people dancing and drinking along to a bad that they brought in from Cajamarca and of course, more water throwing. I honestly don’t know how people drink as much as they do here. Surprisingly we only got two Carnaval related injuries and they were both pretty minor. Anyway, I’m glad I saw this side of Julcan.