This past week, our apartment cooked three traditional Peruvian meals together in celebration of Peru’s independence day! Rosa and Sonya came over to instruct us and help with the preparation. The first night, we cooked Lomo Saltado, which is strips of beef cooked with onions, tomatoes, peppers, and paprika served with rice over French fries. I’ve had it twice so far in Peru, and it’s probably one of my favorite meals here. 

The second night, we cooked Papas a la Huancaína, which consists of boiled potatoes, eggs, and tallarin pasta covered in a sauce made from aji peppers, milk, cheese and crackers. This is also one of my favorite meals, and today I successfully made Huancaína sauce on my own! 

We cooked Bistec con Salsa de Espinaca the third night, or beef covered in a sauce made from spinach served with French fries.  

Sunday’s medical campaign went extremely well! We helped over 110 patients throughout the morning in our local neighborhood of El Patron de San Sebastian. It was our last campaign as a whole group, since Sarah left on Monday and Mark left the following day.

Now that Mark and Sarah have left, Michael and I are the only volunteers left working for the pharmacy. Since he is in the middle of secondary applications to medical school, I’m on my own for the next week or so. One of the doctors that we hire for our medical campaigns, Dr. Rafael, offered to let me help in his clinic, so I’ve been going to the village of Occopata outside of Cusco for the past two days. This village is much poorer than Cusco (as the surrounding villages usually are) and the people there speak Quechua as their primary language. They understand Spanish, but generally reply in Quechua to the doctors and nurses in the clinic.

The town of Occopata

On Tuesday, one of the nurses asked me to help her administer vaccinations to some of the kids at the local school. They receive their vaccinations for free during recess, and after watching the nurse do the first immunization, she let me do most of the rest! 

Dr. Rafael is in the green on the left

Today I went to Occopata again, and was completely shocked by what I saw. Soon after I arrived, Dr. Rafael called me into the back to assist with some patients. I encountered two young children, brother and sister, with warts all over their hands. Worse, they had been scratching the warts for the past few weeks, creating infectious sores filled with pus. The 9-yr-old girl’s hands were worse than her brother’s, and her skin was bloody and raw in most places. The doctor told me to scrub her hands using gauze and soap and water, and also to remove all infected pustules by using a needle or my hands (using gloves of course).  She bravely stood there as I cleaned her hands, but then began to cry as the pain got worse and worse. Judging by the state of her hands, I can only imagine the pain must have been excruciating, especially for such a young girl. 

The hand of the girl after I finished cleaning it (it was much worse before)

The cleaning took over half an hour, and as I scrubbed, her mother came into the room occasionally to watch.  At first I was confused by the mother’s behavior, but the confusion soon turned to anger. The girl’s mother offered absolutely no emotional support to her daughter as she underwent this painful process of having her wounds scrubbed, sterilized, treated with antibiotics, and finally bandaged. No hugs or kind words came from this woman. She simply stood there watching, smiling at times, completely ignorant of the fact that her poor choice in waiting weeks to bring her children to the doctor had resulted in much more severe cases. Even when the doctor and nurse told her repeatedly that she should have brought them sooner, she just nodded as if it wasn’t a big deal, and continued standing there without saying a word.

The brother’s hands were in slightly better condition, but still needed the same treatment. At this point, the clinic got flooded with patients, and so I was left alone to continue with the cleaning and sterilization.

After only two days of observing and assisting, I am already able to draw some conclusions about the problems in Occopata. Most of the children there suffer from malnutrition, and when the obstetrician plots their height and weight on the percentile chart, almost every single one of them falls in the red, or “danger” zone. Each mother is then told the same thing, how their children are losing weight and barely increasing in height at ages when they should be growing. Healthy diets are discussed, the mother’s head gives a slight nod, and I can see that the information is forgotten or dismissed as rapidly as it is given. After a few such visits, I begin asking the obstetrician questions. Why do these mothers seem so complacent about the health of their children, and refuse to take responsibility? Is it the poverty that is stopping them from buying nutritious food, or are other factors at play? She tells me that the mother’s lack of education is one of the main reasons stopping these kids from receiving the nutrition that they need. For instance, the families might own chickens, but the mothers choose to sell the eggs for money and buy their children nutrient-poor rice or potatoes instead of feeding protein-filled eggs to their offspring. It’s not as much a matter of money as knowledge as to which foods should be consumed, and in what combination. The lack of desire to become educated about nutrition is also a huge problem, since the clinicians can only repeat the information so many times to unwilling ears.

These issues really bother me, and I find it hard to understand where the mothers are coming from. I realize that they lack education, but I can’t wrap my head around why someone wouldn’t do everything in their power to improve the lives of their children they love.  I find myself silently fuming, wishing I could somehow convince a mother to bring her kids to the doctor before easily treatable warts turn into a bloody infectious mess, or a woman of 33 to just consider taking birth control to avoid having six children, since she can’t even care for the five she already has. I’ve realized that it’s often easy to assume problems can be solved by providing things such as money, information, or supplies, but some problems remain much more difficult to resolve when they involve the mindset or attitude of a people.