first week in site

Sorry I haven’t written on here in a while; actually as I sit at my laptop in my room I can’t remember the last post I wrote. Training ended up well – I was glad it was over so I didn’t have to listen to Power Point presentations every day, but also nervous to move all alone to my site and not have anyone to speak English to, and all the other responsibilities of course. During training I was sooo excited to just get to my site and start working and stuff, but now I’m here (and granted it’s only been 3 and a half days as I write this) and I feel overwhelmed. Malnutrition is a huge problem, but me just giving “charlas” to the mothers in the communities probably won’t help this. They grow all this nutritious food like quinoa, corn, lots of other veggies native to this area, but then they sell them to get money to buy rice, potatoes, and noodles. The clinic actually does cooking classes as well, I’m hoping to attend one on Monday, so I don’t know how I can make an impact in this area. Maternal health is also a huge issue, mostly related to the nutrition aspect as well, but also due to the fact that many of the mothers are very young and now no longer attending school. There’s a ton of other problems that I feel like I should try to address with my projects, but I just feel really overwhelmed and I don’t even know where to start. Peace Corps has given us an “assignment” to do a community diagnostic analysis using surveys to get a better grasp on the current situation in the community, so this should help me decide what I actually want to do for the rest of the time that I’m here. However, this is also challenging for me because I don’t know how I want to define my community exactly. I live in the main little town of this area and there are 28 smaller villages surrounding it. If I can I would love to give the surveys in all of the communities because that is where the poverty is stronger than here in the central town, but I don’t know if that is too ambitious. Peace Corps recommends having local coworkers or other community members to help with this, but everyone who works in the clinic is already very busy and they won’t have time to go to all the communities with me.
Enough with my preoccupations, now I’ll just write some about my first few days in my site. I arrived in the afternoon with my 2 huge suitcases which was actually easier than I had anticipated, but after a long bus ride which included me sitting in the front seat puking, I just wanted to sleep. I ate dinner with my family later, and went to bed. Friday, I went to the clinic in the morning just to observe to daily functions. The doctor who is in charge, and who is my counterpart, doesn’t work on Fridays, but there was one nurse and one doctor. Usually there is also a dentist, but she wasn’t there that day. Earlier in the morning, before 12 or so, was when most of the patients came in. Many people came to have rotten teeth pulled, but we had to turn them away and tell them to come back in a week, the next day the dentist will be in the office. A lot of the other patients were little babies brought in by their mothers, some with colds or diarrhea. There were some women who came to get birth control pills, a few people with sore throats, a man with an infected burn from a motorcycle exhaust, and a man who had stitches on his foot from some injury last week and I got to help take them out! After a while, things slowed down and I had more time to just sit and talk to the nurse and doctor since there were no patients. I went home for lunch that my sister had cooked for us. I watched a movie with my brother in the afternoon, and in the evening sat in the cabinas with my sister – this is our families business, they sell cell phones and minutes, and have some phone booths. I actually cooked dinner for the family because I was hungry and everyone was gone except for my sister who had to stay in the cabinas, but this was a kind of difficult because there was no running water all day, and actually now it’s still not working. Cooking could have gone better, my family here doesn’t eat as many veggies as my family in Paquiestancia, so there wasn’t much in the kitchen for me to work with. Also, I’ve gotten kind of used to having the garden outside if we need some herbs or any veggies really, but I made do with what I had and they said they liked it. This morning I unpacked my bags finally – I’m living in a bedroom of the house because my little apartment isn’t done yet and might not be for about a month, so I just rearranged the stuff in my bags and put them under my bed. Because of the construction on my room there has been no running water to our house since Friday afternoon.
Sunday I went to the subcentro again; Sunday is the market day here and there are tons of people from all around the communities, so they open the clinic to let the people come in while they’re already in town. There is supposed to be a shaman on Sundays too, but he wasn’t there this week. There were a ton of patients that came in, and the only people working were the doctor, the obstetrician, a nurse who spent all day giving vaccines to kids, and another nurse who is also the pharmacist. That left me to check in patients, meaning I had to search for their clinical history in the semi-unorganized office, then weigh and measure them and take blood pressures. I didn’t expect to be given so many responsibilities on the first day I was helping out, but it was interesting to get to see who all came in. I didn’t really introduce myself to anyone – no one really asked where I was from or anything and I didn’t want to just start talking about myself while they were telling me their problems, but hopefully next week I’ll personally meet some more people here.
One more thing quickly, Sunday also there were a ton of men playing volleyball out in the plaza. Here pretty much only men play, but girls will play just with their friends or siblings or whatever, but on Sunday everyone is watching the men playing. They play 3 vs 3, and the net is probably 2 feet higher than it is in the US. They were really serious about it, I’m not exactly sure how it works but I saw money being exchanged after the matches. Its been pretty cold here the last few days, but they were still out there, some without shirts on even!
I put up new pictures on Facebook too:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2384509&id=19227721&l=a303982b64