Day 9: Clinic Interview & Learning More About Community Members
8:11am. PUC members slowly trickle in as conversation steers from last night's late card games to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. We grab our water bottles and bug spray and prepare for the long day ahead of us, hoping that we will at least get to taste some more of Suchil's delicious mangoes.
We learned a lot about our project today. We found that cutting vent hole circles into plywood with a jigsaw is not quite as hard as it sounds. We learned from Petri, one of the community members, that hail poses a threat to our glass on top of our dryers. We learned that putting a dryer section on the roof is a huge milestone for us, celebrated for by chocoflan cake and coconut milk.
We also learned a lot today about Carlos, the community member whose house the mesquite project is based out of. He's an amazing painter, and seemed adamant about giving us each a painting from his portfolio. Even as we were walking to the Suchil health clinic for our second community interview, we saw some of Carlos's beautiful murals along the way.
Finally, through the day's interview we learned about Suchil's current healthcare system. We talked to a doctor names Eleanor Garcia Sanchez who has spent 5 years working at the clinic in Suchil. She told us that much of Suchil's clinic visits are due to pregnancies and diabetes and hypertension. This supplemented yesterday's conversation with Plutarco which revealed that many people are abandoning their agriculture careers to seek sedentary jobs, which can lead to the diabetes and hypertension.
Evidently all of the health services within Suchil are free, with the exception of health physical type forms and doctors notes. However, the clinic often lacks some of the resources it needs since it gets its funding almost solely from the government. This leads to many people failing to come to the clinic which can be detrimental from the concept of preventative medicine. According to Doctor Sanchez, many people within the community are proponents of traditional medicine, and she would like to learn specifics on these kinds of treatments so that she can better understand how to build from them in a way that might be more economical and is more accepted within the community.
As we stopped for ice cream our way to the hotel, we ran into a really nice woman at the shop who was very excited for us to be visiting and working within the community. Leave it to Daniella to strike up a conversation and casually slip in an invitation for us to interview the woman. She seemed excited for the idea, so hopefully you'll hear more on that soon.
Needless to say, our brains and bodies hurt by the end of the day, but that didn't stop us from starting into some frisbee games and cards when we got back to the hotel. And thanks to Richard and Sarahi, our rooms are newly equipped with new water jugs and fans and raid diffusers to keep out pests. We head to bed with the anticipation of the long day tomorrow that will hopefully bring our ovens to completion.
