Santo Domingo

No internet connection.  The bus did come – at 9:30.  We had the clinic set up and operating by 10:30.  By 6pm, we had seen and given medicine to 150 residents of Paraiso.  We saw many friends who invariably greet us with warmth, affection, and appreciation.  It is wonderful to see Magolis, principal of the school where we hold the clinic.   Senor Wallace is first in line to thank us for helping his community.  Our new medical providers, including Joy Ricasa, MD (W&M 2003), are extraordinary:  energetic, compassionate, and self-sacrificing.  Alejandro Mosquero, MD, is back.  He came first as a third-year and next as a fourth-year medical student.  He’s a resident now and carries full responsibility for seeing patients.  Matt Harrington (’05; 4th year medical student) has been here from the beginning – even before SOMOS.  He was among the founding members of a medical project to the Dominican Republic that became, first, WAMMMC and later SOMOS.  He brought along his partner, fourth-year medical student Sarah Rutherford who embraced the SOMOS vision nearly intuitively.

The students are just as we know them always to be:  deeply committed, smart, and well-prepared to take on the challenges.  They are beloved widely in the community and it is an honor to walk through the area and watch as the residents express their deep and genuine regard and love for them.  Will Blesser (1st year; ‘09) serves as clinic coordinator and is doing a masterful job in managing the work assignments, the rotations among clinic and research teams, and the flow of patients.  His Spanish language ability improved by a factor of two, and his appreciation of the Dominican Republic and Paraiso emerged full-grown.

John Weeks (2nd year, co-leader, 09) and Mohammad Torabinejad (3rd year; ’10) lead the field research effort.  They are the most knowledgeable about the community and they are known and loved throughout Esfuerzo and Paraiso generally.  They know every road, trail, and house in Esfuerzo and have an ethnographer’s appreciation of the rhythms of life there.  They speak and move differently in Paraiso, tuning their behavior to the music of life in the barrio.

 John Pothen  (2nd year; ’11) quickly has become a skilled interviewer, leaning hard and by disposition to the “deep” interview – even when our goal is more oriented to basic data collection, while Usmaan Bashir (1st year; 09) is learning the basic interviewing skills and refining his Spanish language abilities.  Both reach across cultural barriers to connect warmly and appreciatively with the people of the community.  Layla Soberanis (2^nd year, ’09) is a remarkably sensitive observer who provides a steady presence in the field.  She is attentive to interpersonal cues in ways that enhance our understandings of interview data.

There is much yet to be learned as we continue our post-meeting interviews, but it appears likely that our first major, non-clinical health project will be focused either on improving access to clean water or attempting to reduce flooding or mitigate its effects.  It seems nearly certain that there will be near unanimity that both problems are critical and that it is very difficult for residents to distinguish which is the more urgent.  We are finding hoped-for signs that residents can imagine working together and with us to take tentative steps toward improvement.  Still, it is striking that many people have lived together for some time (five, six, or seven years generally) in a very small sub-barrio and yet have only vague familiarity with one another.  They live their lives mostly out of doors and, generally, walk most places that they go.  Still, they do not appear to have close or personal familiarity.