The Real World: Bolivia

Yesterday I spent my first day in clinic here. We couldn´t make it to the real clinic because the roads are washed out (rainy season). So we had a make shift clinic about 1.5 hours away from Santa Cruz. It was about what I expected from other trips. I saw mostly diabetes, a guy who probably has some bad coronary arteries disease and needs an angiogram, but won´t get one because it´s too expensive. I saw this one guys with abscesses all over his butt and scrotum (gross!). And a man with "lumps" all over, probably neurofibromas. No ninos, though! I was expecting to see more kids. Not bad, all in all. I completly butchered the spanish language all day, but I´m slowly catching on. I should have had some more conversations in spanish with Pablo and Lynn before I left! After clinic, we made our way back to the house in Santa Cruz.

So, I feel like I´m on an episode of "the Real World: Bolivia". We live in this gigantic, nice house. Most of the people in the house are between the ages of 22-33. There´s always people coming and going. Let´s see, there is me and the 3 4th year medical students. The volunteer coordinator is just out of college and is living here for 1 year. There is a girl who is taking a year off after 1st year of medical school to decide if she really wants to do medicine. She is staying down here for a few months. There is a canadian social worker who is down here for a few weeks on a project, and taking care of some personal business. My boss´s son is living here, being an "artist", but mostly hanging out with his bolivian girlfriend who lives in the house. And then there are 3 bolivian graduate students who live here, and our housekeeper and her daughter! That´s a lot of people coming and going! There´s a big mix of english and spanish being tossed around.

So in true real world style, most of us went out last night together to celebrate saturday night. Santa Cruz is in party mode right now as people are getting ready for carnaval! It´s a really nice city. We started the evening by going to a brazilian all you can eat pizza restaurant. They had some interesting pizza combos, including a stroganoff pizza with fries on top. They even had dessert pizza, chocolate, carmel, and fruit. Afterwards, we went to a place called Jose Cuervo´s, which lived up to its name. The street we were on was filled with bars and clubs. Everyone was hanging out on the street as well, almost like a large tailgait, partying in the street and in the bars. I felt like I was at some big college town after a football game. We did some dancing. Most of the music was Daddy Yankee style. All in all, a fun night and a lazy morning today!