Preferential Services for the Poor

Photo: Dr. Bob taking pediatric patients in his exam "room."

It happens in almost ever clinic outreach. The extremely poor are almost always pushed to the back of the lines. I don’t think it is an overt distinction on anyone’s part – I just think people living in extreme poverty are not very good at self-advocacy.

This week was no exception. We started with the expressed goal of reaching the poorest communities in and around the city of Ica. Sometime on Wednesday afternoon, we realized that the poorest of the poor were not getting seen. So, yesterday afternoon, we dramatically reconfigured our outreach plan to target our services to the poorest community – the community that brought us to Ica in the first place – the small pueblo jovenes of Girasoles.

Having spent the first part of the week working in partnership with the mayor’s offices of La Molina and Tinguina, we “broke off” on our own and took all of our supplies and the entire team out to Girasols. This was not an easy feet. In the communities of La Molina and Tinguina, the Mayor’s had helped to secure municipal locations or schools for us to use for our outreach sites. In the community of Girasoles, there is no concrete pitch or even flat area for us to set up tents – there is only sand and rock.

Make do, however, we did. We set-up clinic locations in some very unique areas - taking advantage of the shade offered by the bus that transported us out to the community, renting a small tarp covered clearing (we gave the owner of the area 10 liters of water in payment) for pediatric care, filling the seat of an old school bus for our pharmacy and borrowing the shade of a thatched home for triage and registration. In a little over 3-hours, after some very last minute planning, we pulled together a clinic in one of the poorest areas in Peru and served over 200 people.

This week has been an exceptional success. We have provided medical, dental, ophthalmological and psychological services to over 1,200 people. We have worked in 5 different communities and partnered with well over 50 Peruvian volunteers. This has been an amazing week of service. Perhaps we are most proud for our continual emphasis on seeking ways to serve the most underserved.

As the sun went down and our team finished the last of the pharmacy prescriptions, we collected around the school bus to help pack our supplies and head back to the Union Biblica camp. Slowly, but steadily, the Girasoles community came up to our team to thank us for our services. Slowly, but steadily, we all began to realize how important our day had been. At the end of our day - we all realized how important it is to ensure that there is a need to ensure preferential services delivery for the poor.