And now for a cleansing ale

So that was the maggot adventure. A very tasty dish, actually, no feeling hurt in the process. The Amazon experience was very rewarding in the end, despite the many perils of the jungle.

When I was visiting with the doctors at the public clinic (the only place within 200 km that has free services) the doctors were a bit overworked, and understaffed. Three children were born. It was the 4th child for a woman of 25, and 2nd for a girl of 18, and a 13-year old girl was raped at a party around the new year, and now the child comes into the word.

In the emergency room, there were many different wounds and pains. While taking notes about the whole process, I asked the doctor of she needed some help. I figured, “what the hell could I possibly do anyway.” Sure enough the Cuban philosophy of medicine is to train assistants on site. “Let’s go.” Was the response, and there was me taking off the anthropologist hat and putting on the gloves. We treated an infection from an old woman’s eye, mended a bacterial infection that went about 4 inches under the skin on another guy’s buttocks, and helped to pick pieces of bullet out of a guy who got shot in the foot.

That’s public healthcare for you in Ecuador. You do what you can, and for whom you can, when you can. No questions. It’s a damn shame that there is a philosophy here, that is slowly growing in Canada, to remove resources from a public system, and to ensure that everyone’s right to healthcare begins after a $30 consultation fee (the going rate here in Ecuador, which for people making $100 a month, is not even an option in the wildest of fantasies).

I’d like to personally invite Stephen Harper, Jean Charest, Ralph Kline and Gordon Campbell to come down to the Amazon. Spend some time seeing the benefits of a two tier system in a place that is loaded with wealth (Amazon drives 70% of Ecuador’s economy), and then argue that this should be the case the world over.

For more doom and gloom, check out my post on the New Zealand site:

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