After an entire night of nervous tossing and turning I finally just got up at 4 and began getting myself around for the first day of the dental campaign.
You might be asking what it is that I had to do with this dental campaign considering the fact that I am not up on dental at all.
I community organized.
HBI brought the dentists and the funding (woot woot!).
Quechua Benefit and HBI helped get the permissions from a National and State level (the brains and experience behind the campaign planning).
Peace Corps (yours truly) pushed the local permissions through so we could use the space in each pueblo’s health post with municipal support. I helped Quechua Benefit decide where to go based on community interest, need and accessibility. QB and I also got vans and housing donated for the dentists, then advertised like crazy.
It was quite an experience for me, because my now good friend, Alejandro, from Quechua Benefit taught me a ton about the system and how to build a campaign, with all the permissions you need, from scratch. And because I live in the canyon, I was the body that followed up in person with each nurse living in the health posts (at least twice, most locations three times).
In some towns the nurses were extremely excited about helping us and making the space provided for us accessible. Others, didn’t want the responsibility and weren’t quite so easy to work with.
We chose to begin the week with the towns farthest from the central city and work inward for a handful or reasons (eg. smaller populations that would be easier to start with, and if transportation is impossible due to the rains we can go to a closer town and travel to the ones farther away later in the week, etc.). But, we also took on the challenge that we wanted to go to towns that had never been serviced before. Usually, the citizens of the pueblos need to travel 1-4 hours by car, donkey, or foot to see a dentist. Our goal was to bring the dentists to them. Now, the reason there haven’t been medical campaigns in these towns is not only because of the long travel time, complete lack of resources like electricity and water, or because the people have so much need you couldn’t possibly help them all. It is because for some weird combination of reasons getting the paperwork to go through for the permissions or getting nurses to cooperate was a particular challenge. We wanted to serve these most under serviced areas with the biggest challenges and HBI gave us their blessing.
Our goal was successful. We did have to have one site change due to a complete lack of a nurse at all in one of the health posts on all three of my visits. But, we switched to a site that still has a huge need.
Our housing was donated by a Spanish governmental organization like Peace Corps (but not at all like Peace Corps) that has a little commune in Chivay. Four dentists, one hygenist, three assistants, and three coordinators/translators arrived in Chivay last night. The dental team brought everything with them from scrubs, to drills, to a generator, to water bottles. They even had foldable dentist chairs. All of this was organized by the dentists themselves and HBI. I have to say the equipment van was a pretty one even though the dentists still felt a huge empty space when it came to the advanced equipment they are used to in The States.
At 5:30am we all piled into the passenger van donated for the week by Medical Ministaries International. After a bumpy 2 hour ride we landed in the small village of Pinchollo. My stomach ached because no one was answering my cell phone calls to the health post. I worried (almost as much as my grandmother worries about me) that the nurse wouldn’t be there to open the doors for us and we would be left to serve the population on the dirt street.
But, she was there. Not overly compassionate or helpful, but she opened the doors and smiled when I remembered her name. She was my biggest challenge of all the sites we traveled to. In my first visit to her post I presented the campaign to her in detail, this was after QB and I had secured all the permissions from her superior. After explaining the details for about half an hour and feeling that the conversation was wrapping up she said, “It sounds fine, but I can’t confirm I will be here to open the doors for you that day. I have other priorities.” I about head butted the woman. I put a smile on my face and made an effort to kiss her butt, then wrote down her name and made sure to remember it the day we arrived. I got just the smile I wanted. She was very patient to watch us take over their space.
About 40 patients later they had performed a handful of extractions, fillings, and cleanings. The dentists had a car stall on their way back to Chivay, but I was in the equipment van scaling the muddy rain-ridden canyon to Madrigal to secure the space for the following day. As the dentists were pushing the van on one side of the canyon, Hubert, our driver, and I were waiting for the river to lower so we could cross in the van. Everyone arrived safely back in our bunks in Chivay about 4 hours later. Exciting start to the week!
