About a little old woman

Monday, June 25, 2007

The following is the most recent of my required journal entries for IHOP:
On Friday, we packed our bags, sadly said goodbye to Iquitos, and boarded a plane to Lima or the big dirty city as I like to call it. In Lima, we had arranged to rent an apartment in the Miraflores area, considered to be one of the safest areas in Lima and therefore recommended to us foreigners. Normally I don’t get to wound up about what the US Embassy and other expats recommend as far as safety but this time I decided that since I need to have my computer with me and since it’s my summer, I might as well live it up in the opulence of Miraflores.
Our apartment is small but beautiful by anyone’s standards. It is on the main avenue of Miraflores, a couple of blocks from the supermarket and from a gym that rivals many gyms in the US and where we will be exercising during the week. All these newfound comforts suddenly hit me yesterday in a taxi after a long day of walking and shopping (because “it’s so cheap!” as we often exclaim) when I was mentally calculating how much I’ve spent in the last few weeks and how much that same money might mean to some of the patients that we saw back in Iquitos. One patient that continues returning to my mind was an elderly woman that we saw at the hospital who had a melanoma that was gradually taking over her nose. “You need to go to Lima,” the doctor told her, while explaining to us that there are no oncologists in Iquitos. “You need to go to Lima to get care,” he repeated several times.
A cheap roundtrip to Lima can cost as little as 116 US dollars. The care the woman needed, who knows? Regardless, anyone who looked at this woman would be able to tell that she did not have 116 dollars to spend on a trip to Lima. I had 116 dollars. Much more than that in fact. And I’ve used it to buy shoes, clothes, earrings, phone cards, and other things that I suddenly want, but not much I actually need.Being in Peru puts me in a same state of mind as being in Bangladesh often put me. It makes me very aware of the hundreds of privileges I have that the majority of the world does not have. And this is an uncomfortable realization because even if I did give all my privileges up, how much of a dent does it actually make? If I paid the woman’s trip to Lima, can she afford hospital care? If I pay for that too, can the next woman who comes in with a melanoma afford care? Do I pay for her too? I know that it makes much more sense to try to work on what is at the root of the problem—lack of access to healthcare, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, etcetera, but what do we do in the meantime?