The giggles started almost immediately.  Ola. Me llamo Meryl.  I am guessing that it was my remarkably un-Spanish sounding accent.  Ever since my chlidren had taken Spanish in middle school and I had tried to help them study, they had marveled at my attempts to pronounce their Spanish vocabulary words but I could not do so no matter how hard I tried.    But I digress.

Ola.   Me llamo Meryl.   We were standing in front of 60+ students ages 7 and 8 in a small village school about 2 hours north of Quito, Ecuador.   We were part of a small group (40+) of Americans who had traveled on “vacation”  to Ecuador on a service/humanitarian trip. Some of us were helping “teach” in the schools; others were helping paint the buildings or construct tables and chairs; and the medical team (of doctors and nurses and physician assistants and social workers and nurse practitioners and translators), was working with local health care workers and seeing people at local clinics and from a bus equipped to function as a clinic on wheels.

So as the U.S. stands poised to spend billions of dollars on health care reform and to assure that all Americans have access to the highest quality and most affordable care  and to equip our physician practices and clinics and hospitals with the best electronic health records money can buy;  and funding the most robust and comprehensive research and comparative effectiveness studies……………….. I keep thinking back to the people who didn’t know what it meant to use a tooth brush; or to have soap to wash their bodies or their clothes;  I keep thinking back to the young, wide eyed children seeking a smile and a simple acknowledgement from their American visitors; hugging us hello each morning and hugging us good bye each afternoon; to the countless women washing their family’s clothes in the seemingly polluted rivers along side the cows and sheep and llamas; to the men and women hunched over their knitting needles and yarn for 10-12 hours/day making hats and sweaters and scarves so that they could take their products to market and hopefully support their families; to the dozens of elderly who were blinded by cataracts and unaware of how relatively “simple” surgery could grant them the gift of eyesight again; to the pungent smells from shoeless and toothless “locales” who had probably not bathed in days or weeks or months; to the stories we shared with each other during our “evening debriefs” and how each of us was humbled by the innocence and pride and self sufficiency of the people we met; and how we were inspired by their sincere and genuine and heartfelt friendship; and how I keep thinking about the interrelationships between health and health care and education and clean water and clean air and basic sanitation and plumbing and running water and personal hygiene and poverty and illiteracy……..and I keep thinking about the possibility of returning to Ecuador next summer…….because it was one of the best summer vacations we ever had.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Access, Cost, Disparities, Health Reform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.