I’m typing away in my hotel room. The bed is comfortable and the air is comfortably warm. I’ve just taken a shower and I am clean. Even my fingernails are quite clean.
From around 9:00-4:00 I’ve been working at a clinic and its surrounding community. It seems like I’ve been there quite a while but I’ve only worked for two days. I get quite dirty working in the clinic and walking around. Most of the roads are unpaved, dusty, dirt roads. It only rains during the spring in El Salvador.
The clinic is in a rural part of the capital city San Salvador. It’s a single building with one doctor’s office, one storeroom, and a waiting area. There’s a doctor who comes every day; his name’s Eduardo. There is also a stray mother dog that rambles around our clinic. Her name is Proponia, which has no meaning in Spanish. You can see her ribs and her blatantly swollen tits under her sunken body.
The community the clinic services are middle class homes. You enter someone’s property through a barbed wire gate. There are usually several dogs and children running around. The house is home-made, wooden walls with a corrugated steel roof on top. The dirt floor of the path connects with the dirt floor of the house floor. Sometimes there is no door. Other times, the walls are made of brick and the floors are of the material of parking garage floors – and about the same cleanliness.
Yesterday morning we vaccinated dogs for rabies. Pinch the skin about an inch high, insert the needle into the fold, release the skin, push the fluid into the animal. The afternoon was devoted to a “charla” – a chat – about stretching and calisthenics and doing an inventory on the clinic supplies.
Today we split up into groups. One group inspected houses for “denge,” which basically is unhatched mosquito larvae. This can be found in the outhouse, wells, or sinks. I did not do this inspection. Instead, I followed one of the clinic leaders to examine children and pregnant women. We were taught how to look for lice, unusual contusions on the head, unhealthy eyes and noses, inflamed tonsils, hurting abdomens, and abnormal genitalia.
I also saw a pregnant woman. I could feel the hardness and roundness of the head of the baby through her lower belly. I could also hear the babies steady heartbeat through the stethoscope.
Today I also had my first beer and ½ a shot of rum. The drinking age in El Salvador is 18.
Reflections on these events will come later.
