Brigada Medica Part II

Thursday at the medical brigade was a long and relatively uneventful day as not many people passed through. One of the girls that passed through made a sad impact on me though. She’s pregnant and when I first saw her I thought, “wow, she’s really young!” But of course here in Latin America family takes care of family so I figured her parents would probably be helping. Turns out that she’s 14, boyfriend got her pregnant and then dropped her like yesterday’s newspaper, and now her parents are telling her, “If you keep that baby you are never to come back to us.” How’s that for a support system? This is not like the States or another developed country where she then runs to a support shelter, there has never been such a thing even heard of around here. So what will she do? Who in the world knows? The lady from the brigade who was helping her began to cry about the whole situation. I didn’t want to then tell her about Dr. Maritza’s story. She used to work at the same clinic we are at this week and one day a girl arrived of about that age and gave birth. She was going to keep the baby but her parents came and said, “If you walk out of this clinic with that baby you are never seeing us again.” Long story short, she turned the baby over to a family near the clinic and went back home to her parents. That kind of leads you to think that this isn’t the most uncommon of situations, eh? The lady in the brigade says, “I would never let that happen to me!” But there are several huge differences in culture here. The girl here will at best have gone through 6th grade (maybe a little higher), be working, be dating older men (20+ years old), and she lives in a society where men dominate every part of the relationship. I don’t mean that in a sense like we think about in the States, I mean it in a much more extreme sense. You could gather some big differences I think from that list compared with most cases in the States. There’s no real moral to my story here, I just wanted to share a sad case in our brigade…we have pretty good lives.
Just a slight add-on to the previous story: The same pregnant gal came back in on Friday with the complaint of a “worm in her leg.” She lifted up her pant-leg to show me and it looked like a mosquito bite, but I thought since I’m no nurse I’ll pass her on to the nurse. The nurse said, “You know, I’m no doctor, but this looks like a mosquito bite.” We pass her onto the doctor and he says, “Why did you send her to me for a mosquito bite?” Oh the worries of some people over simple things.:)