Life on San Carlos

I feel like not much has happened. I´m settling into San Carlos. I´ve seen a handful of people in the clinic here, mostly giving prescribed breathing treatments and dealing with basic stuff like UTIs and infected foot injuries. The island is all sand, shells, and broken glass. People wear sandals or go barefoot and their feet are in terrible shape. Combine that with a good scattering of burro excrement, and it´s easy for a foot wound to get infected. I wear my sandals all the time and still managed to cut the bottom of my foot somehow. There is one patient we see at his house twice daily. He´s paralized from the waist down from a fishing accident ten years ago. He has a bad ulcer on his heel. We clean it twice daily. His achilles tendon finally tore, but I guess he doesn´t need it anymore and it was a great hiding place for infection. No one here really knows what to do with him other than keep it clean, but we are running out of stuff to clean it with. There is a doctor from the US coming in a few days though, and she´ll be bringing lots of medicines.

We are working on a greenhouse. I cant´remember if I´ve mentioned it before or not. It´s actually to keep the plants shaded and cool. We are going to dig trenches and fill them with good soil for now, and later use compost. It´ll be about the only agriculture on the island and provide some nutrients to the vitamin-poor diet here.

Yesterday we cut down a palm tree that was leaning dangerously over a house. People here don´t know much about felling trees, but at least the palms have soft wood. And, if you get thirsty, there are plenty of coconuts to drink from. I didn´t know this, but in the top of the tree is something similar to an artichoke heart...except its in a palm tree and the size of a soft-ball. Absolutely delicious.

Water here is a problem. It hasn´t rained in a month, although the rainy season is about to start. There is a desalinization plant on a naerby island, and everynow and then a barge full of water comes to San Carlos...but it´s not on any particular schedule. It arrived a couple days ago for the first time in a long while. There was nearly a riot though because for some reason most of the water went to the bakery leaving everyone else no better off than they were. It´s got to be frustrating to watch the clouds blow over the island, then start dumping rain over the gulf a few miles out. We have a well that is the only one in our part of the neighborhood. It is getting dry, but we can pump out about 30 gallons at a time. It goes through a neat thing that you put salt into and connect to a car battery. The battery powers an cell that separates the sodium and chlorine in the salt. The well water passes through a venturi that pulls in some of the concentrated chlorine water. In the end, you have a lot of chlorinated water, a little bleach water, and a little lye (NaOH). We don´t use the bleachwater or lye, but we could. It´s a really neat system. We pump it into some tanks, two for the house that are connected to the plumbing, although we usually dip out drinking water because it comes out brown in the house, and a couple that people in the community dip buckets out of.

I actually met someone last who doesn´t like Chavez. The first since I´ve been in Venezuela. She´s a petroleum engineering student from Maracaibo. She said that Chavez has a great vision, but the people around him aren´t good at putting it into practice. I feel better know that there are people who disagree with him, because it´s just eery to never hear any dissent.

We pìcked up another patient a couple days ago. A 20 year old woman who takes insulin because a doctor recently told her she was diabetic. But she doesn´t understand the disease at all and doesn´t even have a glucometer. The cuts on her feet are extremely infected. In the US she would be hospitalized with IV antibiotics, and maybe some surgical intervention to clean out her wounds -- they are very small on the outside, so you can´t really clean well. We basically just go twice a day, milk as much puss out of her swollen feet as we can, clean things up and dress them, and have her taking antibiotics orally. Hopefully the antibiotics will help. She is basically homeless, currently living in an empty room in the school in the poor side of town.

Something interesting that I´ve noticed is that when I came to Carorita, I thought When the kids from Carorita came to San Carlos, they returned talking about how little the peopel in San Carlos have. Now, in San Carlos, the kids here go to some of the other communities and are astounded by the poverty. It´s all relative I guess. In San Carlos, most of the people are clean and appear to be reasonably well nourished. In the outlying communities though, most people have the look of being very malnourished and do not live in very sanitary conditions. The people in San Carlos have compassion for them, but don´t really have the means to do anything.