The Routine

The routine, my everyday.

A funny family of six and their noises. A combi starting, Ana yelling for Abram, the dogs barking, people shuffling in and out of the bathroom, yelps from the cold shower and the occasional restroom tune.

We all start with bread and tea, sometimes chocolatada(cacao milled with oats) for breakfast. There is the occasional cheese and the ever present, super sugary pineapple jam. They brew coffer here using the sock method. Hang a sock through a wire hoop, add coffee and hot water, strain, add sugar, drink.

A groggy walk through town. With my headphones too often in, catching up on podcasts, news, science health and food ideas or slyly rocking out. Watching everyone wake up, or noting that everyone is already way awake, and that I've been sleeping in again. This is an agricultural town. People are up early to get to the chacra and then return home and to go to another job. Ana gets the some farm time in and then opens the store down town.

Porters for the Incan Trail gather in the square around mamitas selling coffee, poncho and pancito. Blowing on their hands to keep warm and shuffling the weight of their packs back and forth.

The Urubamba bound crowds mug the combis, everyone angling for a good seat. As a 6'2" man in a country designed around people a foot shorter than myself I know all the combis and all the good seats to keep these tree-trunk legs from cramping on the 40 minute ride. A ride defined by school kids, all rowdy, stinky, boisterous, giggling and laughing while displaying little flashes of adult behavior. This is my morning lesson in patience and schoolyard slang.

The walk form the bus depot the health center brings me past Starwood resorts, basketball courts, tire repair shops and a fancy, air conditioned gas station with it's imported booze and chocolate just feet from the women hawking chicha de quinoa or roasted fava beans(delicious!).

The health centro is U- shaped, located directly across the street from the main gas station and alongside a huge Wednesday market where you can buy everything from piglets, chickens, leggings, panties, carrots, tomatoes or a dozen different kinds of potatoes. For record's sake, I've only bought carrots and panties.

The centro smells like a fake pine forest in the mornings. Norma loves it and cleans twice daily while no doubt dreaming of evergreen forests. The walls are unpainted, mostly plywood and the ceilings are high. Earlier this year there were devastating rains in Peru and the two ends of the U were ruined by flooding and rendered useless due to a massive mold infestation and weakening of the wooden infrastructure. "Emergency " consultorios - consult rooms - were built out of plywood in what used to be the lobby. Thankfully, the emergency room - topico and salon de partos - birthing room and the hospitalization/inpatients center were undamaged.

Most of our days, Rocio and I, are spent in the consultorio. A simple plywood box over dark, well worn, wood floors, a simple hospital bed, a stained movable curtain, a desk, a computer and four metal lockers define the space. That and three chairs. When I started volunteering with Rocio we had to hunt for an extra chair every morning, a chair that would inevitably disappear by the afternoon. It took two weeks of chair hunting and meeting all the staff, explaining what I was doing, before the chair remained in the consultorio semi-regularly. I've liberated a few chairs in the afternoons here.

We see about 20 patients in the morning and 20 in the afternoon as well as any emergencies that need attending to. For comparison, the doctors in my current practice see about 16 a day. Imagine what is lost in the rush.