1999 Bolivian Mission Journal

This was really the first year of the mission. Ten members of the Highlands community joined us. The main focus of the mission was medical, and we tried to supply some of the needs we discovered last year. First of all, we tried to help the hospital which was in need of much help. It is a teaching hospital but had no functional laboratory. All tests were done by hand. This is good for fecal exams for parasites, but there were no tests for glucose, CBC’s or chemistries. We decided we could bring them a functional and sustainable bacteriology lad at a reasonable price. Frank Leslie, the supervisor of our hospital lab at the Highlands-Cashiers Hospital came with translator Eugenia Green. There were problems making sterile plates for the cultures and decided that the large fan in the lab was the cause of the contamination. We bought an air-conditioner for the lab and solved the problem. The problem now is that all the people want to work in the lab. Frank also thought that the lab could use some old, reconditioned, and not too sophisticated chemistry equipment that we could purchase and send down next year.

Three women came to teach sewing at the little girl’s orphanage. This is the place where Shannon Shea worked last year, and they have supplied us with another translator this year. This is a marvelous place, a sort of Shangri-La just off the street that houses on of the most disgusting markets in the world. Pigs and other animals are sold with produce all steeped in the same mud (feces). Not a pleasant place. Elaine Reynolds, Mary Berry and Sara Marshall came with old donated sewing machines to teach the girls. They picked up the techniques quickly and were soon making their own clothes. These could be sold to make some money and give the girls an avocation when they are forced to leave after high school.

Dennis Wilson, Peter Sarjeant and Neil Shipman are painting the walls of the new Cruz Roja Clinic. This was where I worked last year, but the building I worked in is now a house for the family who looks after the building at night, and the new building is three stories high. The men prepare and paint the whole first floor, as the other floors are not ready for painting, and won’t be for several years. Neil Shipman is a veterinarian and came to do neutering of the many animals that roam the streets, but, ironically, the only one he did was at the Catholic orphanage, so he helped with the painting most of the time.

My mission was with the clinic and the hospital. There were many patients with Chagas disease, a problem very common in rural areas where people live in adobe houses with thatched roofs. A parasite lives in the walls and thatch and transmits the disease during the night when the people sleep. It affects the heart, esophagus and colon. The hospital has no EKG machines, and they don’t think they need them. “We have no heart problems here.” True, they have little of the type of problems we think of as heart problems, such as coronary artery disease, as the life expectancy is 45 and the diet is poor. Only the rich will get a heart attack here, but there is plenty of Chagas. Next year we will try to bring some EKG machines. This year we did bring an ultrasound machine. Unfortunately we discovered that this machine did not work well with the 50 cycle electricity. A transformer will change the volts from 220 to 110, but the cycles are still 50 instead of the 60 we use in the US. Janis Kendall and I still were able to do many exams looking for gall stones which are very common here, and do obstetrical exams. The images all had streaks on them due to the electrical problem. One little miracle happened to one of our patients. We had done an ultrasound on a woman who was a few weeks pregnant, and a week later we saw her with parasites. I was getting ready to give her a prescription for the worms, when she pulled out the picture of her baby. We decided not to give her the medicine until after the pregnancy. I have seen too many birth defects here in the past two years, and I have felt that one of the problems might be the use of antiparasite medication. The other thing we learned is that one week is not enough time to complete our mission. The shortest trip next year will be ten days, or more.