Today was a long day, but not strenuous. We got up at 7, spent awhile at breakfast, and brought our luggage down to the lobby, where Teresa met us. Teresa is the Country Director for Project HOPE in the DR, and my main supervisor for the summer. After checking out of the hotel, Teresa took us to the Project HOPE clinic in Buenos Aires de Herrera. We observed as we toured the clinic, saw/cooed over adorable babies, and met the staff. The Herrera clinic, like the one in Monte Plata I’ll see tomorrow, is set up in a spoke-and-wheel design. The center is the waiting area, with each of the services/offices housed in rooms that branch off from the center (with the exception of the pediatric dentist, which was added later and is in a separate little building to the side). K & B asked Teresa and a couple of the doctors at the clinic about “AIEPI,” about which everyone had only positive things to say. Upon Googling I discovered that AIEPI is the acronym for “Atención Integrada a las Enfermedades Prevalentes de la Infancia,” the Spanish translation of the WHO initiative “Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses” (IMCI), which Project HOPE has implemented in their clinics. Read more about IMCI on the WHO website here or the short attention span version on the UNICEF site here. After seeing all of the clinic, Teresa, the community health/outreach nurse, the “HR” nurse and Orlando (Teresa’s “right hand man,” who does lots of number crunching, report-writing and all the web/tech stuff for the clinics, and with whom I think I’ll be working closely this summer) sat down with us in the conference room to talk about how the clinic is organized/their roles and challenges in running it, as well as room for improvement. Most interesting is that the clinics are nurse-run and self-sufficient financially.
We left the clinic around 2pm and were taken to a mall food court for lunch, where we had a choice of all manner of fast food. K and B were especially happy to get pizza, which they had been craving for days. I had Quiznos for the first time in my life. It was pretty tasty, though the broccoli soup should really be named cheese soup with broccoli bits. We transferred our bags from Teresa’s car to Orlando’s, and he drove us from Santo Domingo to Monte Plata. It had been raining off and on since noon, but really started pouring (monsoon-like) about halfway through the drive. Nonetheless, we took in the scenery as we drove through/by small rural towns and fields.See above for a sample view through the rain-covered car window.
We passed several baseball fields and a sign saying “Home of the Seattle Mariners.” We arrived at the house next to the Monte Plata clinic just before sunset. We were greeted by a herd of cows grazing in the field next to the house. After a few minutes, a couple of guys on horses appeared and herded the cows further into the field.
All the rain made a pond out of part of the road by our house
We were welcomed to Monte Plata by cow butts
I spent the evening unpacking, taking advantage of the wifi when it worked (i.e. watching Mad Men and chatting online), and killing spiders. Could be worse.
5 Responses