Peru Was the Highlight of a Banner Year So Far.....

I just finished the eleven-day trip to Peru and while visiting this area has long been a dream of mine, the actual trip exceeded even my highest expectations. To say it was life-changing would not be overly dramatic. Because there is so much to report, I'm going to divide it into two sections: most importantly the medical clinic work the first week and secondly, the side trip to Cusco, Pisac and Machu Picchu.

We flew into Lima on Saturday, November 3 arriving late and spending the night at the airport before an early morning flight on LAN Airlines north to the city of Piura. We had a group of seventeen including two MD's, one dentist who was joined by two Peruvian dentists, a pharmacist, two Registered Nurses and several aides. We didn't have an optometrist this trip and I ended up doing many of the eye functions including testing for distance, reading, prescribing lenses, and assembling the eyeglasses. We were helped by a number of local university students who served as excellent interpreters but did anything else we needed such as holding flashlights for the dentists to pull teeth and helping the doctors. We had three helping us with the eye clinic and they were quickly able to test as well as interpret.

When our medicines and supplies were late reaching us by truck from the Lima airport, we had Sunday free to explore Piura which is located in the extreme Northwest corner of Peru very near the border of Ecuador. It is the capital of this region and has a population of about 400,000 and it was here that Spanish Conqueror Francisco Pizarro founded the first Spanish city in South America, San Miguel de Piura, in 1532.

It is a clean city with good restaurants and we all felt safe walking around. Like all Peruvian cities it has a huge church and plaza. Although the region is barren and desolate--almost desert--we all came to really like the city and were sad to leave it. We did leave, however, every morning for a 1 hour 15 minute bumpy bus ride up into the countryside to an isolated, impoverished village named Viviate (you can't even Google it). There is sporadic electricity but it only operates a few hours a day if at all and on no regular schedule. The bus ride to Viviate was literally a ride back in time--people were traveling by foot or on donkey and pulling carts loaded with things to barter.

There is a small clinic with nurse here but the emphasis is mostly on first aid and childbirth and we were reportedly the first medical group to visit the village in nearly three years and as a result there was a large line waiting when we arrived Monday morning. We held the clinic in the local school which was walled with a metal fence and when we left each evening there were massive lines still waiting and they would wait out in the open all night with their children so as not to lose their places in line. It hurt to leave them there at night but was so rewarding to return in the morning when they would cheer, wave and try to touch us as we got off the bus.

Americans really have no concept as to how fortunate they are to have what we have in a world that is so decimated by poverty and disease.

I think the dental clinic was probably the most sought after service. The people have terrible teeth and to kill the pain they often chew coca leaves to deaden them while the problems continue to deteriorate. The three dentists set up office in one of the classrooms with one old pre-WWII dental chair, a fold-back beach chair, and a straight backed wooden chair. The clients had absolutely no privacy and would be seated, charted, given pain killer and then wait with a paper cup until the gums were dead enough for the teeth to be pulled. As assistant would hold a flashlight for the dentist (something I did several times) and the patient would spit blood into the paper cup. There was no running water available for drinking, cleaning or rinsing. Initially the dentists tried to pull only a couple of teeth at a session but the lines were so long the patients were begging for all their bad teeth to be extracted at one time. On Wednesday our Canadian dentist reported he was still receiving patients at 3:00 pm who had spent the previous night outside waiting in line!

We had a very effective method of cold sterilizing the equipment with disinfecting solutions but you can imagine by early morning there would be blood on everything and the place must have looked intimidating to the patients coming it but all they wanted was relief from their teeth pains. One of my most enduring memories of the dental clinic was around mid week when I went in and there was a little girl of about 7 or 8 in the brown leather chair. She had her bib chained around her neck and was holding her spit cup but hadn't been given a shot yet and was waiting for the dentist to see her. She looked so small and all alone but when I winked at her she broke into the biggest smile. No telling how long she had waited outside and no matter how intimidating the clinic must have looked to her, she was getting her teeth fixed and that was all that mattered. That night she almost certainly had to deal with the pain by taking Advil in a home with a dirt floor and no electricity but she had one of the prettiest smiles I've ever seen.

We had two MD's and they worked in separate classrooms and saw anybody with any kind of problem. There were a considerable number of pregnant mothers wanting prenatal checkups, lots of babies with assorted issues, and adults with a litany of medical problems. We found a high incidence of hypertension and couldn't treat it other than counseling since any medications we would hand out could not be renewed once we left. Both MD's were absolutely great, patient, and resourceful. One of the more unusual wounds we treated involved a man who was riding his donkey when a drunk motorcycle rider hit him and really messed up his leg.


We had an elderly man come in with a tumor right above his left eye that had grown to the size of a golf ball. The doctor deadened it and in the photo with the white sheet covering the man's face, the trumor was removed and the cut stitched. He looked a little rough afterward but was happy as could be because he could now open his left eye. His wife stood in the corner throughout the whole procedure crying, praying and crossing herself but when they removed the sheet from his face she knelt down and started praying silently.

For many of the children it was literally their first trip to the doctor and they reacted differently from child to child. Some were terrified while others were curious. One little girl in the adjacent picture was both--very cautious while also playing with the stethoscope. The treatment must not have been too painful because when it was over she leaned forward and kissed the doctor on the cheek. Even more telling, I think, is the mother's face. She's proud her daughter got to see the doctor and happy to find out she's healthy. These scenes happened all day long for five straight days. We left early, took no breaks and a short lunch and worked usually until 5:30 or 6:00 pm before the long bus ride back to Piura where we arrived exhausted but feeling very rewarded.
I worked in the eye clinic and we had the largest lines and served the most people because we didn't have the issues the medical doctors and dentists had. We tested for distance glasses but mostly we tested for and dispensed reading glasses. Without electricity the elderly in particular have the most problems seeing close up--usually reading or sewing. We tested one 94-year-old woman and gave her the strongest reading lenses we had to help her thread the needle when she was sewing. Another older woman came in and complained she couldn't read her Bible so we worked with her and when I gave

her a mid-strength set of reading glasses she literally sucked in her breath--she hadn't known just how bad her eyes were. You need to remember she had stood in line in the hot sun for probably at least ten hours to get these glasses and we ended up finding a pair of really strong lenses that she seemed most comfortable with and she left as happy as anyone I saw during the four days we dispensed eyeglasses. The following day there was a commotion outside and they thought she was jumping line (which we had to monitor VERY closely) but she had come back with her Bible and insisted on reading some verses to us to show us the glasses were working. We took a break, listened to her, and shared her happiness. Before we got her out of there she insisted on praying for all of us which, of course, was always welcome.

The children are so beautiful in Peru and one very small little girl with big black eyes came in with her mother. She was complaining of headaches at school and was holding her books too close to her face and squinting so we found her a low-strength lens that seemed to make reading easier for her. We had her read to us and the mother was obviously so happy for her. I had her go up to the blackboard and write her name and I thought the mother was going to explode with pride. I was very pleasantly surprised with the literacy rate in this poor village--the very young and the elderly all seemed to have fundamental basic reading abilities.

Cataracts were a big problem here and we couldn't do anything about them. Several had been diagnosed but couldn't afford the money to have them corrected. We had an old man with really bad case of cataracts and all we could do was let him try on glasses until he "thought" he could see a little better. We assembled the glasses for him and he stumbled over to the dental clinic and announced to his wife that "he could see the children on the playground!!!"

So we dispensed glasses, the nurses triaged, the doctors and dentists treated and the pharmacist dispensed medicine--in other words were were for one week a real medical clinic. The local school shut down for one week just so we could use the facility. In the end we dispensed over 1025 pair of glasses, the doctors saw and treated over 500 patients and the dentists treated over 300 people.

We had a long line waiting for us when we arrived Monday morning and they never went away. We used the wristband system of placement and made no exceptions about letting anybody cut to the front for any reason rather than obvious heart attack or childbirth. In an event I'll probably never forget, an elderly man who could hardly stand or walk showed up but the line was almost all the way around the school. We offered to give him a number and a chair he could use in line but wouldn't let him get in front of the others who had been waiting. One women with three children had been in line the afternoon before and hadn't made it inside so she waited with her three girls outside all night and was near the entrance gate when the old man came up. She said she wanted her children to go in first but she gave her spot to the man. That's a definition of "compassion" you don't encounter very often!!!

As the week neared Friday the lines got longer and longer but the people were so polite and appreciative. Friday morning we quit giving out wristbands and announced we were going to be closing the clinic. Those who were left out were obviously very upset and at one point we called the police in just to monitor the situation. As we did close, we loaded up the bus and those desperate to get in watched as we left. We were really dreading this moment but as we drove off, they all began applauding us even though they didn't get treated.

So say this experience was rewarding is an understatement........