No, there is NOT a doctor in the house....

Imagine it's early in the morning tomorrow, say, 5:00 a.m. Your name is Lisseth, and you live with your 4 children in a small house. You struggle to make ends meet. Your husband left last year to find work in another country. You haven't heard from him in 6 months. Your 2 year old is very sick. She's vomiting and seems to be running a high fever. You don't have electricity, running water, let alone baby Tylenol. You also don't have a telephone, a car, a motorcycle, a horse. The closest pharmacy is 90 kilometers away and the closest doctor is 60 kilometers away. The one bus that leaves your town left at 4 a.m. Your neighbors have as little as you do.
What do you do?
This is the situation facing the village of Mechapa. MINSA, the government-run Health Services office, just announced yesterday that they will be closing the only medical office in the area. It was small and the doctor came only 3 or 4 times a week, the roof leaked, bats lived in the bathroom, and supplies were limited. But it was something. A place to go when you just don't have anywhere else to turn.
We've helped mothers like Lisseth. We've distributed age-appropriate medicine, as well as bandages, vitamins, diapers, baby formula, and other over-the-counter medicines that we either bought or received as donations from friends and family. But even our supplies are running out, and we're not in a position to stock our office with all that is needed to help our neighbors.
When Doctor Amener was in town, his sleeping conditions were so bad at the medical office that we opened a cabana for him to sleep him. It had lights, a fan, a bathroom. It was cool at night and safe. He called it "cielo" - heaven. He received notice that his contract, which had been renewed for 15 years straight, was cancelled. He will soon be out of work in a country where it is difficult to find a job (like so many other countries) -- even for a trained doctor.
I'm not worried about our doctor friend, though. I'm worried about Lisseth and all of the other women like her. I'm also worried about the men who work in Mechapa. Many are fishermen and suffer a wide variety of bad cuts, scrapes and sprains that come with fishing from 4 pm until 6 am in the Pacific Ocean on an 18-foot panga. Many of the mothers in town don't have basic health and hygiene education for their children. Their little ones walk barefoot through mud filled with animal feces and play in water with green mold floating on it. In the past, humanitarian organizations (like CARE and USAid) came and worked with the families to help educate them about some of the precautions they could take to protect their health. We haven't seen a group since January 2008. Back then, we gave two of the nurses a cabana, as well, and told them that we would open our doors to their organization in the future. So much funding has been cut by foreign countries, including the U.S.'s Millennium Challenge Corporations dollars, and I fear that this closure is just the tip of the iceburg.
I'm not sure what can be done. To start something going, though, we've typed a letter to the Minister of Health at MINSA stressing the importance of keeping the medical office open. Our friend Colleen from Chicago helped in the editing of it. We've started a signature petition, too. If you have any ideas, please, PLEASE write me.
For now, I'm going to go to the MINSA office on Tuesday with the town administrator to drop off the letter. Then, I think I'll talk to a couple of the established foundations in Chinandega and see what I can scare up. Maybe you can help - make a suggestion and I'll follow through!
Stacy