Todo para la salud

The past week or so has been especially crazy and blogging got shuffled to the bottom of the list. Stressful things that have happened include:

1. my computer crashing: maybe hard drive, maybe a mega virus? if only i had computer skills!
2. switching internships: this is crazy in a good way and the main point of this blog update
3. the arrival of med school secondary applications: there are 5 sitting in my inbox. thanks for crashing this week, computerfriend
4. realizing that I have less than 3 weeks left here in Oaxaca and only a month before I'm back at ND: this is also a good type of stress. It's encouraged me to jump on those activities that I keep putting off until another weekend. It's also great because I'm getting around to missing my family and my house and my pets and my lake and my friends. This whole not having a computer is really getting to me, although I feel like I should be above that. Oh the struggles of a middle class American!

But as the title suggests, this is not about silly stressful things. It is all about the health. I just finished my first week at not-Puente. Thanks to Agustin's connections (the man knows everyone!) and Susannah's patience, I moved to a health clinic in the Colonia America, a 15-minute busride from our neighborhood. The Mexican public health system is arranged into primary, secondary and tertiary care. Tertiary care involves specialists and serious surgeries, hospitals are considered secondary care, and clinics or health centers fulfill the role of primary contact. This reduces the demand on the hospitals for everyday attention such as prenatal care, immunizations, and low-risk procedures while allowing patients to develop a closer relationship with their assigned doctor in the local health center.

Since my health center is very centrally located, most of the "sexy" medical cases bipass it in favor of the nearby hospital, but this doesn't mean that it's a boring place. I showed up with the expectation of just observing and figuring out how things went for the first few days. In addition to the nurses and doctors, each health clinic has promotores who are officially in charge of public health initiatives and unofficially in charge of fun. What luck that they're in charge of me!

My first week at the clinic consisted of a nice mixture of time with doctors and promotores alike. I gave a small talk in the waiting room on dengue fever (no one really listened but that was alright), learned to use the scale and helped with check-ups for school registration (number practice!), made a poster about all the scary shit that's in cigarettes, attended an exercise class, and spend some quality time with Dr. Francisco (I'm convinced that his stethoscope is a fake). Most of the action at the clinic happens between 8am and 11am, after which "no hay nada", there isn't much happening. After a second breakfast, I usually hang out with Tere and Esdras, the promotores and we have a great time. Whether we are hiking across the neighborhood for an appointment, only to find that the person took the day off or making a mess on the desk with poster glue or sampling a local beverage called tejate, Tere and Esdras have a great explanation for the activity. With a smile and a joke that I usually don't understand, they cheerfully explain that we're doing "todo para la salud". Everything we do is for health. While this is probably not exactly true, it makes everything seem very important and exciting. 

While there is definitely a lot of downtime at the clinic and I am not spending as many hours interning as I really want to, I'm overall much happier at the clinic than I was at Puente. The next few weeks are going to fly by and be gone before I know it! In the meantime, I'm going to fill my time with food adventures, market wanderings, and a potential salsa dancing date.

Love and miss you all!