Rurrenabaque

A month ago, on Halloween weekend (Day of the Dead is celebrated here on November 2nd), Dave and I explored Bolivia’s Amazon rainforest, via the small town of Rurrenabaque. Rurrenabaque is in the North West of Bolivia and is not very accessible; travelers have two transportation options, to either take a small plane from La Paz to the dirt runway of Rurrenabaque, or to take a 20 hour bus ride from La Paz, but caution, the road is impassable when it rains; we chose option A, the flight.

Rurrenabaque (Rurre) is popular as a traveler’s base for trekking into the Amazon or touring the pampas. With only a long weekend, we had to choose, and chose to explore the Amazon for two days in Parque Nacional Madidi. We arrived in Rurre on Saturday afternoon and booked our trip with a tour operator for the following morning. On Sunday morning, we awoke to torrential rains, and realized we needed to put our ponchos on and meet our tour guide down at the river to start our two days in the jungle. Soon we were in a motorized dug out canoe (with a cover), in our ponchos, cruising down the Río Beni in the rain with three fellow tourists from Germany, and after three hours, we reached our camp site.

After lunch, we headed out on our first hike with our guide, Eloy. We saw several small yellow monkeys and explored the amazingly dense Amazon forest. We came back to camp for dinner, and then ventured out on a night hike. With our flashlights, we navigated the forest, staying close to our knowledgeable guide. When we came upon water (a stream or swamp), Eloy would chop down a few small trees, and make a bridge for us. On the night hike we saw tons of spiders, to include a tarantula! It was the size of a kitten and black and hairy! Unbelievable, literally beyond anyone’s imagination (Aunt Jane and Callie, you would not have liked the night hike!) Our guide’s sense of direction was astonishing; in a vast forest, with seemingly no landmarks, he was always capable of orienting himself with the camp site, and finding alternate paths.

The next morning, we woke up and enjoyed a huge breakfast of pancakes and fruit. We set out on another hike with Eloy, who told us that for the next few hours, he was going to show and tell us about the natural medicines in the Amazon. Again, his knowledge was really amazing; he would stop and tell us about a tree that produced a syrup that you could drink to cure malaria, another tree whose leaves you crushed and made into tea to ease your throat, another whose leaves acted as Viagra, and so many more. On our walk we also saw a herd of wild pigs (cerdos de la selva), which looked like wharthogs. After lunch, we got back in our canoe and headed back to Rurre where we spent our last afternoon lounging in hammocks.

Centro Medico Wiñay

I wanted to share a little bit more about my volunteer position with Centro Medico Wiñay to give you a better idea of what I’ve been doing every morning for the past five months.

My day starts by catching a trufi, a shared taxi van with a set route, two blocks from our apartment that I take for 30 minutes to the town of Quillacollo. I get to the clinic, on Quillacollo’s central Plaza Bolivar around 9:00 AM, when the clinic opens (the clinic closes from 12:30 to 3:00 PM, and then reopens from 3:00 until 8:00 PM Monday through Saturday). The staff is the receptionist and assistant nurse, Aida, the administrator and head nurse, Jimena, the lab technician, Nery, the sole gynecologist/doctor, Melania, and the rotating dentists, Ximena and Marlene.  Wiñay also has a central office and clinic in La Paz, and occasionally Doctora Rosemary from the La Paz office will come for a visit, to check on accounting, and overall clinic productivity. 

I spend my mornings at the front desk, caja, checking patients in, helping to fill prescriptions, organizing patient histories, and helping out wherever someone needs me. Since Wiñay has no appointment system in place, patients will come in, inquire about how many patients are waiting, and then decide to come back in an hour, or some wait for two hours until seeing the doctor. Since it is not an emergency center, patients are usually coming in for a routine check up or regarding a specific ailment. There are mornings where by the time I walk into the clinic, there is already a mass of patients surrounding the front desk: a woman picking up her PAP results, a mother with her son who has a toothache, or a young woman seeking a family planning orientation. When this is the case, we usually have to start turning patients away by 11:00 AM, asking them to return in the afternoon since we only have one nurse, one doctor and one dentist. About 90% of our clients are women, with the occasional male coming in to visit the dentist or for a general medicine consultation.

For the past two months, I have been collecting data for a research project that I am conducting for Wiñay and for their previous funder, Planned Parenthood International. In total, Wiñay has over 18,000 patient records on file since their opening in 2000, and of those 18,000 files, I randomly chose a sample set of 200 histories to look at and collect data from. I have been looking at the client population, to include gender and age and level of education and specifically what services they have come to the clinic for. As a sort of sustainability report for Planned Parenthood following their funding, I am also looking into the productivity of the new lab at Wiñay. This project has been a great way to learn more about the clinic, the services that we offer and also about our client base. My last day at Wiñay will be this coming Tuesday, and it has been an amazing learning experience.