Thursday was fun, albeit tiring. We started out in the rural part of the district. Imagine if some of the Indian reservations in the US were transplanted right next to Grand Rapids…that’s kind of what this was like. You could still see city skyscrapers, but the town that we were in was nothing more than little plastered up houses and tumbleweeds. The healthcare center here was very small, but it reminded me why it’s so important to have some sort of a public healthcare system. If the federal government wasn’t paying to have a doctor and a nurse stay at this center, these people would probably have nothing. It’s a good 2 hours by donkey cart, and even longer walking into the city. For these people, whose entire day is filled with trying to make sure they have enough food, traveling down to the city center for a vaccine just isn’t going to happen. However, the center provides vaccines, maternity care, and can help them get set up with rides if they do need to go into the city for something more serious.
We also visited the orthodontia center. It was really cool, but a few things bothered me. First of all, there were lots of people waiting, but no one had any procedures going on so we could tour, so I felt very intrusive. Secondly, we are apparently big news in this town, so they sent a reporter and a camera crew to follow us. This would have been fine, but it caught me really off guard, and they were really in our faces. Luckily, everyone knew that it made me uncomfortable, so we made a kind of game about it, protecting me from the “paparazzi”. We went back to the same steakhouse for dinner, and it was just as good as the first night. The owner recognized us and brought out the really choice cuts of meat. We ended up getting a photo with him because, hey, why not?
Friday was probably the best school day of the trip. We started at the clinical laboratory center. They basically do all the lab work for all of VdC. We got to look at some samples of common bacteria under the microscope, but what I found most fascinating was the sheer efficiency of the place. We got there at 9, and there were probably around 100 people waiting. When we left at 10, all but maybe 3 or 4 of them were gone.
Our next and last stop in VdC was the maternity hospital. This was amazing. We toured the whole hospital, including the NICU. I think this visit really shattered all of our conceptions of what a hospital should be. In the US, our focus is on individual care: you need your own bed, your own room, your own personalized meal plan, your own doctor, your own surgical team. Everything needs to look nice and smell nice and the sheets had better be 400 thread count or someone’s maternity hormones are gonna go off someone, am I right? In Brazil, the focus is almost the opposite. Maternity care and giving birth is a community event within the hospital. Mothers who give birth to underweight babies all live together in the same room. Up to 8 kids (and their parents) can share a room. Obviously those who need to be quarantined have their own room, but there are very few people that it comes down to that. Breast milk is shared: because so many women have HIV/AIDS, there is a large donation site within the hospital that non-infected mothers can donate to. It goes through a very thorough screening process, but most mothers participate. The overall cost of the hospital is very cheap too. They’ve taken out all the niceties that pervade American hospitals, and focus only health.
After we finished up at the hospital, we were off to get a quick bite of lunch and back to the airport. It’s a little bit crazy at Brazilian airports-there really isn’t security. When we left Salvador, we had our bags x-rayed and we walked through a metal detector, but that was it. We didn’t have to take off our shoes, take out our laptops, or put our liquids in baggies. If you wanted to bring a large bottle of water through, you just had to take a drink of it to prove that it was actually water. When we left from VdC, we didn’t even have to do that. A security guard checked my ticket, and they had a standby guard. That was it. After having to go through so many checkpoints in the US airports, it was kind of startling.
When we finally got back to the hostel, I pretty much crashed. We played some card games out in the courtyard, but we were all pretty exhausted. I did realize something though….the hostel feels like home :)
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