¿Cachai? Sipo.

Riding the metro in Santiago is a blast, and it’s super efficient and speedy and goes to all the places I need to go, but it’s also crowded as hell. At rush hour, it's literally wall-to-wall people, clown-car style. It makes a pretty good environment for pick-pocketing since you’re being bumped and touched all over anyway. So it’s important to keep your backpack OFF your back and within sight, and to keep all valuables somewhere that’s really hard to get to without you noticing. I did none of this things because I’m a dumbass. So anyway, my camara got stolen out of my backpack. I'll get a new one but until then, no more pictures :-(. Luckily I didn't loose any because I had already uploaded it. Here's the last picture my faithful camara took before being stolen from me by the mean metro pickpockets:

That's my host family. Don't I fit right in? Now that I actually understand what everyone's saying (sometimes), I'm starting to get to know them and really loving it. They're a very smart bunch of people, and it's really fun to talk politics with then...or just watch trashy telenovelas (much more common past time).



I just realized I haven’t yet talked about my trip to Maria Pinto on Friday, so I’m going to do so now. Maria Pinto is a rural area (“Comuna” – like a collection of little towns.) The area is very dispersed, lightly populated, but far enough away from the city that they require their own health care system. Our trip was pretty short, just a few hours, but we got to meet the mayor and observe the various forms of health-care providers that exist in the community. There’s one slightly larger one that serves about 6,000 citizens and is open 24hrs, but there isn’t always necessarily a doctor. Then there’s the “Posta Rurales” that serve about 1.000 people each, and are open during very specific hours, which makes sense consider the lack of resources but less so consider the fact that the purpose is to provide emergency care. We didn’t get to speak with any patients but we talked with a few nurses and “tecnicos”…they are like medical technicians/paramedics, who only get 1 or 2 years of training. Most of the time, in the Posta Rurales, that’s all there is…the doctors and nurses are there only 1 or 2 days a week. It’s a little depressing. But what else can they do?

Today was also an adventure, starting out bright and early at 8:30am at the Hospital Clinca de la Pontificia Universidad Catolica. My group was assigned to the “cirugía” unit, which turned out to be less exciting than expected since it was just post-operation care. But we did get to learn a lot by talking with the nurses and patients, and most important by snooping around the files because there’s no such thing as HIPAA in Chile. It’s a teaching hospital, so since we I was wearing a white lab coat and taking notes, no one questioned me when I started searching through files to figure out what surgery a certain patient had just had. Talking to the patients was my favorite part, though. I spent a lot of time talking with a younger-looking man who was undergoing kidney dialysis and has been awaiting a kidney transplant for a year (if I understood his Spanish, which I might not have…). Even though he was hooked up to the machine and stuck in a hospital bed he (along with most of the other patients I talked to) was in pretty good spirits, and very interested in what I had to say about the Chilean healthcare system, how it compared to the one we have in the US, and most importantly, who I had supported in the democratic primary. Such is life, I guess.

I also had a fascinating conversation with a professor who gave our lecture today in the “theory” portion of the observation. He’s a physician who also does epidemiological research (SIDE NOTE: did you know that in 1960, Chilean children under 5 had a malnutrition rate of 60%....guess what it is now? Due to a free milk and nutrition program provided to 100% of children who need it, ZERO percent of Chilean children under 5 are malnourished. Unfortunately, one of the downsides of a country and the children developing so rapidly? …Obesity has become a huge problem. Thank you, globalization. McDonalds for everyone! I find this stuff fascinating, sorry if you don’t care.) ANYWAY, this professor and I had a fascinating conversation after class, comparing our opinions about the health system in the US and it was so interesting to hear his “outside observers” opinion of the US. We eventually segued from healthcare to politics in general. I mentioned how I was surprised by how much the people here care about the outcome of American elections. He said something along the lines of, “When the US sneezes, Chile gets a cold.” It reminded me of the Great Depression section of the Museo Historico Nacional from yesterday. I’m going to blame my ethnocentric schooling for the fact that I had NO IDEA that the NYSE collapse had effected other countries so gravely. I’m kinda embarrassed to admit that now…it makes a lot of sense in retrospect.

Chilenismo of the day: "po" I think it originally started as "pues" which means "well" but now it just gets added to random words, usually "si" and "no" as in, "Sipo" and "nopo" or the anglification, and my personal favorite: "yapo."