It’s time for a little rest.
The past few days (especially yesterday) have been long and busy. I feel great, but there are a few things going on that are letting me know that I should stay en hogar this afternoon. Or at least en vecino. So I’m working at home (well, goofing off right now) reading articles, researching, and thinking through possible questions.
Yesterday, I left just before 8am via taxi to Hospital Maria Auxiliadora to meet with Michaela, the director of the MAMIS program. The taxi driver, an older gentleman who drove very nicely, did something that usually makes me nervous: he took back roads. I felt that I could trust him and his methods were obvious: you could see the major road ahead with traffic and he’d turn on a side-street just before the main road. The way we weaved in and out of the side streets felt uncomfortable, but I trusted my instinct of him and all was fine. (Taxi drivers are suppose to stick to main roads. There are local reports of taxis driving into back roads where they meet up with a gang that surrounds the car and robs you. So, we are advised to tell taxis to stick to main roads and be cautious about the details of how you both chose and engage in the use of a taxi.) It so happens that we got to the hospital in 20 minutes (wow). I probably should have asked him for his name and number for future calls, but the “back roads” method did not set well with me (Valerie has strickly schooled me on this and I felt a bit badly about not following her wisdom and experience) so paid and let him go. I arrived at the hospital grounds 40 minutes early.
Arriving early was a great thing. I got to observe the chaos of morning appointments. Under the SIS plan, Lima’s poor may enroll in government health care programs for children under the age of 18. (How poverty level is established and monitored by the program, I am still trying to figure out.) I believe that many appointments are first-serve: hence the incredible morning lines throughout the hospital. I also managed to speak to a guard and get into some of the main hospital, where I decided to sit in the cool hallway bench outside of x-ray. I wasn’t there more than a minute when I was joined by a young woman, no older than 20, and an older woman who must have been a mother or mother-in-law. The young woman had very recently endured a terrible beating to her face, she was in awful shape. As they sat down beside me, not noticing or making any motion toward me, I heard a whisper from the older woman to the younger, “dejeme hablar“. She was telling the girl to “let me talk.” The irony: I was there to meet with the director of the hospital violence program and was sitting beside a woman who was both an obvious victim of violence and a victim of silencing. What could I do? Options limited, I remained in my anthropologist role.
Moments later, the x-ray hall was filled with several nurses pushing a square office cart, filled with blankets at the top — babies. One of the nurses noticed me and promptly plopped down beside me to chat. She told me she was also pregnant (3 months) and did the obligatory “belly display” where pregnant women show their bulging middles pressing through their clothes. We chatted causally, the obvious questions… what in the world is a pregnant gringa doing in this hospital, on this floor, on this morning?! Once curiousity abated, she brought over one of the babies (there were three in the cart) as the other were brought one by one into the x-ray center. The magical moment: I held him, one day old, while the others went in!
The meeting with Michaela went splendidly. She proved to be a wonderful contact. Some surprises: she ushered me into the main offices and introduced me to the Director of the hospital(!) and several heads of departments. We discussed meeting again for a more formal interview (con grabadora) in the future.
After my meeting with Michaela, Angela met me in front of the hospital gates with a taxi. From there, we road off to Las Pampas, a puebles jovenes in San Juan de Miraflores. Las Pampas is the community most studied and programmatically served by PRISMA (local NGO I’ve mentioned in previous posts). Angela is conducting her disseration research in this community and I joined her — got a small tour of the neighborhood, met the staff, helped out with some IRB applications (specifically for a great photovoice project Angela is doing) and then took part in a focus group with 15-17 year old boys (part of Angela’s disseration). It was after 6:30 when we finally started the trek back to Miraflores.
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