Entonces, visitas domiciliarios - one of the amazing things about the HIV program at Cabral y Baez is the home visits that they do. Aside from the handful of incredible and devoted physicians who treat the HIV patients there, the social worker who runs the HIV program visits the patients in their homes. Assessing the home environments is so important, but more than anything it just reinforced the extreme poverty that many of the patients lived in.
The picture to the right is a photo of one of the living rooms of a patient we visited on the last day of home visits. No habia un bano a dentro, no habia una neverra y todo la gente en esta barrio se limpiaron sus comida y ropa en el rio which ran along beside the one road that all of their houses lined the opposite side.
Other houses we visited were one room seperated by a curtain with one bed to sleep 5 people and a tv on one side of the curtain and a stove and tiny table on the other side of the curtain. The bathroom a small ceramic toilet with no lid surrounded by only three walls with a shower head on one of the walls. Fungus growing underneath. Con los pacientes que tuvieron SIDA, fue tan peligroso a tener condiciones tan sucios en respecto a sus systemas tan supressadas....
It was sad, and I felt especially during these visits so lucky to have what i have and so helpless to do anythign about their conditions. Pero una cosa beuna fue que one week after leaving the DR we found out that the governement had decided to give ten more bags of food per month to the program to hand out to the patients. So.. one step at a time I guess.
We are still working on putting up a website, finding funding and other ways to help with this little piece of amazing that struggles along in the bigger broken system of health in the DR :(...
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