A little good news to start with: As I'm sure you've all heard, the miners were successfully rescued from their earthy prison this week! Chile is abuzz with pride and relief.
Today's not so much about Chile, though. Over the weekend we went to Tacna, Peru for an educational excursion. Tacna is located just across the border from Arica and the two cities are very much interconnected. Tacna lives for Arica.. or should I say because of Arica. Chileans fuel this anything but metropolitan city with their tourist dollars when they regularly cross the border to take advantage of the disgustingly low prices.
It was a very interesting weekend, but also somewhat conflicting. We witnessed firsthand the difficulty of carrying out good public health policies. (Warning: for any of my (numerous, I'm sure) readers who have not been subjected to listening to one of my public health rants.. the forecast looks cloudy) Peru is in the process of instituting a prevention and promotion model of healthcare- which is great. The whole idea of public health is that it's 100 bajillion times better to keep your community healthy than to let them get sick and then try to fix them. It saves money, gives everyone a better quality of life, leads to a more productive population.. all kinds of fabulous, wonderful results. To do this, the healthcare system has to be designed to focus less on illnesses and more on people and educating them.
Sounds simple, right? Unfortunately, super wrong.
Doctors don't dedicate years of their lives to learning how to fix people only to then focus on something else. Especially if they're overworked, underequipped, and not adequately paid. In Tacna we went to a health campaign in an incredibly poor neighborhood on Sunday morning (the only time the people didn't have to be at work) and watched doctors do anything but institute the shiny new plans for improvement of health promotion and disease prevention. That would mean empowering the community, which would take time and effort, and some pride swallowing.. which apparently weren't in the cards for that day. The idea of patient's rights and confidentiality don't even exist for these people. Another afternoon we went to a community meeting of mothers who were being educated on HIV/AIDS and watched a health educator give rapid HIV tests to all of the women in front of the entire group, including the results! Thankfully they were all negative- but what on earth would have happened if one had been positive?!
It was an incredibly enlightening experience. Every semester I sit in classrooms and talk about the theories, the ideas of how we can implement better public health, about the programs and interventions we could do to make people healthier, but the reality of the situation is a completely different story. This is my passion, it's what I feel like I'm supposed to do, but that day was discouraging to say the least. I think it was a bit of a reality check for all of us that if we really care so much about fixing these issues it's going to take a lot more than research papers and seminars.
The whole weekend was a bit of a whirlwind as we went from lectures to health campaigns to community gatherings to home visits for patients to dinners with the staff that was hosting us. On top of that there was shopping to be done and Peruvian cuisine to be tried. We even went to a vineyard to learn how pisco is made on our last day, which was very interesting. Oh and I haven't even mentioned the hotel...
Can we say 70s?
You gift-wrapped my toilet? How nice...
Some traditinoal dancers at a Peruvian buffet.
With a "Macchu Picchu" at dinner with the "Equipo de Suenos" (Dream Team).
The glorious Equipo de Suenos... and glorious dessert.
Besos y Abrazos de Chile!
Even Rihanna's jumped on the bandwagon, but I definitely had mine first.
