Wednesday January 17, 2007

Photos: modern art, Nica door-style (left), and Hospital Infantil. Children like their hospitals brightly colored.

I visited the bedside of a young girl hospitalized with dengue fever. She had been painfully sick for five days prior, but was accompanied by her mother and well on the road to recovery and away from the road to serious complications. Since the happy ending was in sight, I can look upon the episode selfishly as a nice legitimization of all my molecular and analytical research on a disease no one in America feels.

As I toured the pediatric hospital with two young doctors, I was bestowed a respect I would never receive in the self-gratifying halls of an American medical ivory tower. The medical and skilled professional classes of Nicaragua have suffered as their economy has suffered, and doctors, as a result, frequently take two jobs. They do not receive the pay or respect in their home country that would be afforded them if they studied or worked abroad, self-perpetuating the drain on their health care system. The best, brightest, and most ambitious leave where they are most needed. This is a medical problem plaguing much of the developing world. As a result, I was only a student, but American-educated and, therefore, undeservedly afforded a certain level of authority, on peer level with experienced young doctors who treat seriously sick children daily. Another Berkeley graduate student, who has spent several months here, tells me she is treated like the boss, and often reminded she doesn’t need to ask permission for her requests. The humorous benefit of this undue authority is that the American students and faculty running the studies can actually get the doctors to heed instructions and take the appropriate patient samples and data. A foreign-educated doctor recently joined the Children’s Hospital and, because he’s foreign-educated, is causing waves by doing as he pleases.

I drank Coke from a plastic bag today. The family serving lunch was especially attached to their bottles, so a coke-to-go became a coke in a bag tied off around a drinking straw. It wasn’t the easiest thing to carry. Gallo pinto is served at every meal, and I’m already sick of it, but madura will be greatly missed when I leave. It’s similar in color, shape and texture to a banana, but sweeter, excellent fried, and a good side for just about everything. It was off the menu tonight, however, which was good, because it might not have been the best accompaniment to my housemother’s lasagna; similar to the Italian version, but more watery, and using a bitter Nicaraguan queso. I had two helpings.