Para el Mundo Mancora

I have been in Mancora now for about a week. Things have been interesting, to say the least. There are more than a few organizational and communication problems in this NGO, but nothing more than I was expecting. I am living in a volunteer house with 6 other volunteers: Sarah and Rachel, who both are recent college graduates from the US; an older lesbian couple from Canada, Maggie and Michelle; Caitlin, who I just learned is Maggie's daughter from her first marriage; and Alia, from Alaska, who just arrived the other day and who I was alone with in the house for a few days because all the other volunteers had just gone on vacation. I feel like we're already close friends; it's a little scary actually, how much we have in common. Then there is another Canadian lesbian couple, Shelly and Stacey, who are also volunteering but since they are staying for a whole year, have rented a house to themselves. I don't have any gripes with anybody, it's a good group of people, if a bit lacking in maleness. As for the town of Mancora, it is nothing spectacular, although it is a bit of a hot spot for Peruvian tourists at this time of year because of the nice beaches. It's basically a very impoverished town whose economy depends on tourism.

The main challenge so far has been trying to find things to do. PaM is an organization that has lots of alliances with community institutions but mostly relies on its volunteers to come up with their own projects. I don't really feel like I'm staying long enough to start a major project, so I'm trying to just latch on to a bunch of other projects. This week I should be pretty busy because we are starting a summer camp in the mornings for 40 10-year-old boys, and also the center for special needs kids is just beginning a summer session. In the week since I arrived though, the only thing I was able to find to do was help out with a project through the medical center whose aim is the prevention of dengue fever, a disease carried by mosquitos. Helping with this project involves me accompanying one of four health promotors to several houses each day, to inspect the water deposits in the house and make sure they are not filled with mosquito larvae, which they often are. In Mancora, most people have some source of running water, but the water supply frequently gets cut off for periods of several days. For this reason, most people have to fill up trashcans with water when there is water, or buy water from vendors who bring it from the nearby Tumbes. Even when boiled the tap water is not good to drink, because it is full of heavy metals. So needless to say, the whole water situation makes things pretty difficult for people. Even though they are constantly advised to keep their water buckets covered and wash them out frequently with detergent, people often leave their water sitting out uncovered for too long, creating a perfect breeding ground for dengue-carrying mosquitos.

The project has been interesting for me partly because of my interest in public health, but mostly because I have had the opportunity to go inside a lot of houses. It is really sad to see the filthy conditions that most people here live in. Many of the houses are made of a straw-like material (that sounds funny in english, but I don't know how else to describe it), but most are some combination of bricks, cement, mud, cardboard, scrap metal... pretty much any available material. Besides the water situation, people often have farm animals in their houses, and sometimes leave food and dirty dishes all over the place, so there are flies everywhere. Usually when we find a water deposit with larvae we just dump it out and clean out the inside of the container, but this changed from Wednesday-Friday last week, because the community was without water for three days. People are sometimes unwilling to dump out even water that they know is breeding mosquitos, because they can't get it anywhere else. In this case the health promotor will just tell them to use it as quickly as possible, and then they will come back the next day to make sure the water is gone. Once, a woman told us she could not dump out her larvae-filled basin because she needed it for bathing. "But are you going to bathe even with the larvae??" said my compañera, Felicitas. The woman just shrugged. She was probably used to bathing with larvae.

But the thing I've seen that has made the strongest impression on me so far is a single mother Felicitas and I chanced upon in her house the other day. This woman was the mother of a 5-month-old baby, but her husband had left her and wanted nothing to do with the child. The woman had to wash clothing to make money to support herself and her baby, but she said the people who were supposed to pay her hadn't paid her in awhile; maybe she'd get paid tomorrow. She didn't have any water deposits, either. When we came in the baby was wrapped up in a hammock in the center of the room, looking around but perfectly still. The mother told us the baby had a fever, had had one for two weeks actually, and hadn't wanted to eat anything, not even breast milk, in 15 days. 15 days!! In all that time the baby had only wanted water. I guess this was probably a slight exaggeration, and the baby must have been getting nutrients somehow or it would have been emaciated or dead, but even so... 15 days had gone by and this woman hadn't brought her baby to the doctor, because, she said, she didn't have money. The problem with that rationale is that here, every baby born into poverty has health insurance covering the first two years of his/her life. The woman brought out a document in a plastic cover, which was the baby's health insurance. She had assumed for some reason that it had expired, but it hadn't. An examination for the baby would have been free. Felicitas told her that she should bring the baby to the doctor right away, and I wish there was some way to find out if she ever did. I couldn't help but wonder if there was some small part of that mother that hoped that her child would die, just to make her life a bit less hard. Desperation is the biggest killer I think, because when people lose hope, they lose everything.