Another field trip!

This Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday we had another public health field trip! My favorite part was possibly that we stayed in the same hotel for both nights. I enjoy having a couple days where I'm not always packing and unpacking! Also, there was a frozen yogurt place right down the street from us... needless to say we made a couple of visits! The trip itself was okay content-wise. Our goal was to learn more about tropical diseases and what they mean for public health, so we went to "the coast" (we were nowhere near water but it had tropical, coastal climate) and visited some health centers. We had just reinforced in class how there is a huge social component to tropical diseases, and it is not totally dependent on location. Unfortunately, the visits of our trip had a huge focus on the biological side of tropical diseases, which was interesting, but doesn't really go along with the point of our classes before. The first visit, to a private medical center called Hombro a Hombro ("Shoulder to shoulder"), was probably the best one! They don't practice any traditional medicine there, mostly because they are small, but the doctor who spoke to us explained how they have a good relationship with all of the rural community leaders so that they can work together for the common health of the people. They also suggest that people see the shaman as well as the doctor so that they are not neglecting any form of care that could help them. He also told us about how he has taken the time to learn all about the culture and the habits of the people he treats so that he knows how to make his care relevant to them. This was a very good visit!

Hombro a hombro!

Unfortunately, the rest of our visits were headed by a local employee of the Ministry of Public Health, who is skeptical of the campesinos (poor rural farmers, basically) and really likes to focus on the biological side of disease. We visited a few more centers, of which my favorite was the lab of the Ministry hospital, just because I miss lab stuff. :) Next we were headed to a very poor barrio (neighborhood/street of run-down shacks) to talk to their area leader about the social aspects that affect health and tropical disease, and we were super excited about that! Turns out, there was no one there that the MPH guy thought we should talk to, so we just walked through and left. He kept bringing up how they "don't invest in health or education, and are just consumerist with their cell-phones and big TVSs" and didn't acknowledge any of the problems that were outside of their control. Yes, I agree that it is probably not wise to spend your money on things you don't need when you are living without savings for health and school. But I can sympathize with them that life probably isn't very enjoyable if you are literally just living to survive, and sometimes it just feels nice to surprise your family with something nice, so for a second you can feel like maybe you don't live in a dump. There were other annoying things he kept saying about them without giving credit to the real situation or how they, as a government organization, have the responsibility to give them fair opportunities. Overall, we got a good look into how a lot of the government organizations view the poor, and while we didn't directly learn about the social aspects of tropical disease, we learned just as much about the political view on it.

Chagas, a bug that bites you and then poops near the hole so you scratch it into your bite. It's pretty bad. These are a bunch of dead ones they showed us in a lab that studies the tropical disease vectors in the area. It was interesting, but not really the information we were looking for from this trip! And our professor agrees.

I miss research :/ I wanted to use those pipetters so bad!

Looking at some blood with leishmaniasis!

Randomly during the lab tour, one of the women working in the lab asked us, "Do you want to see a pineapple farm?" (in Spanish of course). So, off we went to a pineapple farm. It had nothing to do with what we were learning, and our professor was clearly annoyed that we were getting really late on our schedule, but we all enjoyed the tour!

I never knew how pineapples grew!

Tour of the factory where they prepare the pineapples for shipment. On the left is the woman who offered for us to go here (she literally just got up and left her job to come with us... it was a little strange) and on the right is Ivan, the Ministry of Public Health guy we were annoyed with! 

The last thing we did for our trip was visit a tour place for las Tsachilas, which are an indigenous population in this area. It was interesting to learn about some of their medicinal plants! The overall experience was a little touristy for my taste, but we all enjoyed it.

Our guide showing us something about heating the leaves and healing something with them. It seemed interesting - I wish I would have understood more of what he said here!

Our professor helping in the demonstration of their contraption to juice the sugarcane. 

These cool pod things that you break open and much up the seeds inside with your finger to make a bright red paint!

Last but not least, we watched the Ecuador-Chile soccer game in our room with our delicious fro-yo. :) They may have lost that game, but they still made it into the world cup, so that was exciting! I will admit though, soon after this picture was taken I fell asleep and remained that way for the entire game. I like pretending to be a sports fan, but let's be real!