2018 Peru - Day 5

I am not sure I mentioned this, but our base has been a small hotel in central Chulucanas. It is about a ten minute walk to the stadium where we held two days of clinics. All the restaurants we have gone to while here are within a short walk of the hotel. Chulucanas has a population of around 40,000 people.

Today we head to La Encantada, a small village about thirty minutes from Chulucanas. We scoped out the location on our first day, and my assumptions were right – we have access to a large room (office) that opens up to the main street of the village, and a shade structure (20ft x 40ft) over a concrete pad at the back of a large yard. There is a broken down car propped up in one corner of the pad. And there is a small concrete structure in the yard about 4’x8’, inside is a toilet with no supply plumbing. You flush by pouring a bucket of water in the tank. I'm not quite sure when it was cleaned last. We lovingly refer to it as “La Banjo Encantada” (The Enchanted Toilet).

Triage is set up just outside the front door of the main building. The Hygiene and Restoration Units are set up in the the large room. The Exo and Sterilization Units are set up under that shade structure in the yard. The clinic will have great flow, and we will have good control keeping people out of areas where they are not to be. That being said, all day we have village dogs wandering into the clinic, sniffing around. In fact at the end of the day one dog decided that a spot under one of the Exo tables was a good place for a nap.

On the way to La Encantada we pass banana plantations, fruit orchards, fields of maize, and a cluster of brick kilns for small scale clay brick production. It is a lot less humid here, but hot. It must be at least 35ºC, and very dry and dusty. At the end of the day a lot of us are sunburned – and that from very short exposure to the full sun.

I took some time to go for a walk around town. Most of the buildings are built from local clay bricks – small one-story structures that are built right to the edge of the sidewalk. Some have windows, others just iron bars. The roofs are of corrugated steel. The yards are fenced with sticks, , logs, boards, sheet metal or posts strung with barbed wire. Most people have some form of livestock in their yards; chickens, turkeys, donkeys, horses, goats, or sheep. Everywhere dogs are asleep in the shade. Some have dug down to the cooler dirt six inches below the surface and lie curled up in the depression.

I watch a man on a homemade sulky, the horse trotting lazily in the hot sun. The cart holds a load of freshly cut maize, and the man’s dog sits faithfully beside him.

Today I meet a man named “Joel”, and Andrea treats a seventy-seven year old woman named “Victoria”. As she lays down on her back for treatment she pops out her top dentures and slips them into her bra for safe keeping.