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HOME	CLASSIFIEDS	OBITUARIES	SPORTS	OPINION

Thursday, August 07, 2008

Spreading Health Care to Amazon

By Laura Nesbitt
Mountain View Telegraph
      A 2006 trip to the Amazon rainforest changed the life of a Mountainair woman.
       Anita Soluna said she was struck by the difficulty of access to health care in that remote region of the world. So with her travel partner, Stella Cruz-Galvan, Soluna started the Peruvian Amazon Health Care Cooperative Project.
       “We were at a village … and a little boy was vomiting. He was on his mother's lap, and he was vomiting repeatedly. Our guide went over to find out what was going on and came back to me and said this kid has got malaria pretty bad. We were able to take him on our boat to the health post,” Soluna said about a child she met on a trip to the Amazon last month.
       Soluna said the little boy was a representative of the group's work.
       “In this case it was almost like saying, this is what the co-op is all about. When you have an emergency you can call and the ambulance boat will come get you,” Soluna said.
       The little boy with malaria is only 7 years old, and his treatment will be ongoing because he did not receive medical care until after he began exhibiting signs of malaria.
       Since 2006, Soluna and Cruz-Galvan, the founder and project administrator, have expanded their vision of a health care cooperative linking 14 villages on the Momón River in the Peruvian Amazon. They are now a 16-member team, with two paid employees who live in Peru and visit the villages on a regular basis. Unpaid team members pay for their own airfare, lodging and meals to visit the area.
       Soluna and Cruz-Galvan's project was recently adopted by the Peruvian American Medical Society, a larger nonprofit, that will act like an umbrella organization.
       “This project is one big, giant miracle. The only regret is that I can't be there as often as I want to, and that we can't provide as much (assistance) as we'd like to provide,” Cruz-Galvan said.
       To build the cooperative, the group has selected an area about 35 miles from the largest city in the region, Iquitos. It can take up to eight hours by boat to reach Iquitos from some of the villages the women hope to incorporate into the cooperative.
       “We will have radio hook-ups at each one of the villages and also on the boat, so if there's an emergency in the village, we can send the boat down with the doctor and they can triage on the boat,” Soluna said.
       The Peruvian Ministry of Health operates health posts in the jungle, according to literature from the group. But because of limited access, many residents of the area postpone health care, Soluna said. The first priorities of her group are an ambulance boat and a communications system.
       Soluna and Cruz-Galvan plan to fund the cooperative with contributions from the various villages that it serves. “The (Peruvian) doctors don't make a lot. We think of (salaries) in our terms. There, $10 goes a whole lot further than our $10 does. It's a matter of figuring out how many people are going to be able to join and if they want a doctor with a minimal service then this is what they'll have to pay,” Soluna said.
       “I'm very idealistic. I don't believe in borders or nationalism. I believe in humanity. This is a human thing to do. This is the right human thing to do,” Cruz-Galvan said.
       For more information on the project, call 847-2855 or visit www.amazonhealthco-op.org.
       

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