La Casa Embrujada

 There’s a bunch of dirt/mud paths wrapping around and through the banana fields. Oh and also there’s a school, multiple factories, a church, soccer field, and bus station all on the plantation too. We’ve been going on some runs along these paths and after clinic on Wednesday we got a whole crew to run or walk to La Casa Embrujada aka the haunted house. You have to run up these winding stone steps through a mango grove (almost ripe!!) to the top where there sits a house that would’ve been really cool—would’ve had multiple rooms and a pool and overlooks endless miles of banana fields.

The story of its haunted-ness is that they kept trying to finish the building, but it was for the son of the devil and so for this reason bad things kept happening to the builders and it remains atop the hill unfinished. Weird things happen to you while you’re at and after going to this house, and there're fewer steps going down than on the way up even if you count very carefully.

Either way, the sunset was dope (appropriate use of a selfie stick) and we took the nearly ripe mangos with us. Can’t wait to eeeeeat them!

The next day during clinic there was a graduation for adorable little toddlers who completed a nutrition and cooking class with their moms.

Also, I’m writing this after completing my first whole week of clinic! And Friday afternoon my PA student friend was busy so I saw patients totally by myself in Spanish. I wouldn’t call myself eloquent but I could understand (which is tough with the local accent since they drop the second half of most words) and get my point across too! Let’s call it progress.

Some general observations from clinic:

--There are a lot of myths in the community about medicine and a belief that God is the only force behind health, it may stem from a global lack of education (only 1-6^th grade are publicly funded and many people drop out after 2^nd grade while very few pay tuition for 7-11^th grade) but it certainly contributes to a lack of personal responsibility for health and creates a difficulty for medical providers to work on improving habits or to explain diagnosis and treatment.

--Patients generally expect an appointment to result in a prescription (even when not necessary).  Some feel cheated if you don’t give them one. They can buy whatever they want over the counter elsewhere, so we’re probably one of the (if not the) only pharmacy to require an MD’s prescription.

--People wait a lot longer to access the healthcare system. Since people don’t access the system often, every appointment is an opportunity to sneak in health education and routine exams and labs.