Hoy en tu comunidad

This past Saturday (the 26th of September) was my first excursion with Hoy en tu comunidad. I spent the day in a pueblo about two hours outside of Mérida, named Tikit, with a team of doctors and medical students, providing free health services to the members of the community. The UADY medical students were very helpful, and the docs certainly taught me a great deal. I worked in triage, taking down medical histories and figuring out what the specific problems were we had to deal with; I took blood pressure, heart rate, did ear and eye exams, and helped out a little bit in the treatment room as well. What interested me was how incredibly different, yet functional, the little clinic was. Set up next to a dirt road, there were stray dogs running through all day, crowds of people gathered around a little collapsible table trying to get someone to listen to them (though some spoke only Mayan and needed translators to speak to the Spanish-speaking docs), suffering from conditions easily treatable in other parts of the world. What confused me was that Mexico is supposed to be excellent as far as the social security system and other public health services, providing free medical attention and medicine to many of its citizens, yet so many problems exist! It was explained to me that so many people in the pueblo suffer from easily-treatable conditions not because the medicine isn't free for them, but because it never arrives. With a shortage of medicines and so many people in need of them, a small pueblo like Tikit is one of the places that almost never is reached by the medicine vans. It was great to see so many people being helped in one day, and we were able to give out a lot of medicines that we brought with, but the sad thing is that this is a once-a-year event for them; if they get sick the rest of the time, the likelihood of getting any sort of healthcare is slim to none, let-alone medicines.

My anthropology of health class (la antropología de la salud) is teaching me a lot about other forms of treatment in México. The majority of Mexicans, according to my professor and other students I've talked with (nearly 99%, they say), hold a lot of traditional beliefs about sickness and health. For example, "mal de ojo" (the evil eye) is an acceptable reason for sickness: someone looked at someone else funny, and now they're sick. The first thing mentioned when someone gets sick here is the energy in the air, or the spirits (I'm not kidding - this happened just yesterday again). Few people result to biomedical treatments as their first option. Instead, herbolería, plants, acupuncture, even Mayan prayer rituals, are still held as practical and reliable treatment options. The general feeling I get from this class is that doctors are perceived as impersonal and robotic, not delving into the cultural aspects of treatment. Alternative treatments (that have existed here thousands of years before Westernized medicine came into the picture) are still alive and strong in Mexico.