Tuesday

Sam in the pharmacy


Waiting for their prescriptions

Posted by Jim K.

A pleasant day today for those of us on the clinic team.

Sam, John, Peter, and I joined our 15 or so colleagues in traveling a short distance to a school affiliated with a church we worked at last week.

We’ve been learning about the community development programs that proliferate in this area. They tend to include church, school, clinic, library, economic projects, etc. Many are affiliated with international groups such as World Vision or Compassion International. In this entrepreneurial age, the international group provides funding and training but gives great responsibility and latitude to the local group.

The people who run the school we were at today were extremely grateful. They spent the last hour of the day or so making for each of us a small basket with an artificial flower and ribbon with Bolivia’s colors.

Mid-day we experienced again the ways of the country, especially regarding attitudes toward time. Having forgotten that they planned to make lunch for us, we’d made sandwiches. Their lunch, we were subsequently told, would arrive for us at 11:30. At 12 we stopped taking patients for the morning. After an hour of soccer or reading (depending on age) we decided we better eat our packed lunch so we could get back to work. Sure enough, just as we’d finished our packed lunch, they marched in with large pots full of food. Of course, we had to eat it, so it was two o’clock before, stomachs extended, we could get back to work.

This approach to time is one of the many cultural attributes it can be hard for northerners to adjust to, and its implications are broad. The very interesting book I’m reading (Whispering in the Giant’s Ear by William Powers) portrays, among many other things, the ways in which the proclivity for people here to live in the present has had extensive economic and political consequences.

The Williamstown group is relatively healthy, though almost all of us have had our times of not feeling our best. I’m not sure how much has been related to altitude, but I suspect quite a bit.

Having not read the previous postings, I don’t know how much people have described the physical surroundings, which are dramatically beautiful. The mountains make the Berkshires look like speed bumps. There’s so little atmosphere at this altitude that the number and brightness of the stars are astonishing. For the same reason, the quality of light is brighter and clearer than anything I’ve seen.

As you can see from the photo of Sam working away today in the pharmacy, much of our days are spent indoors, though we try to get outside as much as possible.

Only one and a half more days of clinic work, then packing, then a travel day Friday to Santa Cruz, then for the Williamstown group a couple days of R and R, and then the long trip home, though we hope not as loooong as the trip down.