Children's Schools, Medical Schools, and soon, Medical Education in the Amazon

The beautiful city of Arequipa with Chachani Volcano in the distance. It is a much broader volcano with many eruption sites so it is not a single cone. The smaller photo shows the active volcano El Misti at right.

Points of Interest

Photos from our "Vision" visit and other point of interest:  

*Meeting with doctors and touring a teaching hospital.  

*At the temple site in Arequipa with Moroni, who is our manager and a native of Arequipa.

*Where they took us out to lunch in Arequipa, they put a bib on Rob. I guess he looked messy.  

This week, we had the opportunity to be involved with the preparatory work for a vision project which will happen within the next year.

We traveled Monday to Arequipa along with a vision specialist (ophthalmologist, Mike Pingree) from Salt Lake City who helps with assessment when one of the major initiative vision projects is in the development stage.

Arequipa is a beautiful colonial city surrounded by three large volcanos; it has lots of terraced agriculture within the city and, even though it is a city of nearly one-million people, it has a small-town feel to it.  Many of the buildings are constructed of a white volcanic rock from the area (it is sometimes referred to as the "White City") and the streets are remarkably clean with rarely a piece of trash being seen and surprisingly sedate with a lot less traffic than Lima. The drivers seem to honk their horns a lot less than those in Lima as well. Most of the buildings where we drove were one or two stories and that helped to give it the appearance of a much smaller town. We understand that the center does have some high-rise buildings and traffic is more congested there, but we did not have the opportunity to get into the center of town.

The rainy season will begin in November and that brings snow to the volcanos surrounding Arequipa. El Misti still had substantial snow on the top which was not really visible in our photos. When the rainy season begins the snow on the mountains can nearly reach down to the city which sits above 7,600 feet from sea level. The gradual snow melt during the year allows agriculture to flourish.

Our reason in coming to Arequipa wasn't to see the volcanoes, which Rob thought were really cool, but to meet with the state health department and medical school faculty to determine vision needs, both for training and equipment, which should increase their capacity and improve their ability to care for the needs of their people. Dr. Pingree is the specialist from Salt Lake who helps with project development. He has done so in Peru for about ten years now.

After discussion with the local professionals and assessment of what they viewed as their equipment and training needs, we (mostly Dr. Pingree) determined how to proceed with the project. One component of the project will be to perform vision screening in the schools. After the initial screening, these children will be measured by optometrists for appropriate corrective lenses so they can perform better in school and also receive correction for conditions that can lead to preventable blindness if not corrected. Then, 2,000 pair of eyeglasses will be donated to those schoolchildren. The other component of the project will involve some needed equipment to improve capacity of the teaching hospital we visited that is adjacent to the medical school. Additionally, there will be a training visit by a U.S. specialist from the Church who will provide surgical technique training. Our role as representatives of the Church will be to coordinate the project and provide follow-up to determine if it produced the desired outcome.

Much of the rest of the week was spent in following-up with other projects in process. This was in addition to getting 83 boxes of Neonatal Resuscitation training materials ready for shipment to the Amazon region of Peru where we will be traveling later this month with a team of doctors from Salt Lake City and Lima to conduct training for about 100 birth professionals there; those trained will in turn train another 400 from their regions in the techniques to save the lives of infants who have breathing problems at birth.
(Note: When we did the follow-up a year after this project, the participants had actually trained over 900 other professionals in the techniques they learned at the course.)

A cool thing about Peru is that people come through the neighborhood selling knife sharpening services, bread, and other things. Pictured in this post is the "Tamale lady" who comes through with fresh hot tamales she has made at home. We bought chicken and pork tamales and they both were really tasty. We now listen carefully for her high pitched cry of, "Taaaa-maaaaa-leee!" to go get some more. 

More...

Also included are some photos from the schools around our neighborhood. The schools for the younger children are painted with fun and inviting colors and pictures:  

*School crossing guard  

*Brightly painted elementary schools  

*50 year celebration of this school. This work of art on the street is made out of flower petals.  

*Music schools  

*Getting ready to ship supplies for a neonatal resuscitation training.  

*Rob making his first tamale purchase in Peru.