Medical Campaigning and Potatoes for Lunch

Haley and I got our first Peruvian sunburn this last weekend! Curahuasi weather is amazing. It is usually around 60 to 80 degrees outside and the sky is clear. It is wintertime now and drought season so there hasnt really been much rain (we got a light drizzle one day). Anyway, all this to say that I was not expecting to get a sunburn at all since the weather is so pleasant. However, since Curahuasi is set so high up in the mountains, the sun is very intense.
Where did we get our sunburns? I can answer that: We got them while in a little town further up in the mountains than Curahuasi, on a Medical Campaign with Diospi Suyana Hospital. The town was a two hour drive from Curahuasi, mainly because of all the twists and bumps along the way. The name of the town was Ccocha (pronounced "Jocha"). Ccocha really does not look much like a town at all and I would have said it definitely was not a town except for the solitary cluster of school houses located by a lake. This is where we set up for the campaign. We left Curahuasi at around 6:00 am and once there began pushing tables together and covering them with blankets and sheets to make makeshift beds. In one school house was the clinic, and in the other was the pharmacy. Outside, was admissions. It turned out to be a pretty relaxed day, especially for us volunteers. Not enough publicity was done and where, last time there had been a line all the way down the hill by 8:00 am, our first patient did not show up until 9:00 am. Most of the patients were Quechua and they had the traditional Quechua dresses and hats on. I helped out a bit in the pharmacy (under Claudia, the pharmacist) mainly putting medicine in bags for the patients and pulling different medicine out. Most patients only spoke Quechua so there was much translating needed.
Come about 1:00 pm one of the guys who had opened the schoolhouse for us came up saying lunch was served. We all gathered around two red chairs with bowls filled with potatoes and cheese and lunch was served. Someone produced a guitar at some point and began singing different songs in Quechua, Spanish, and English.

 By the end of the day, there were about 55 patients who showed up in all. Everyone had mixed feelings about how few patients had been able to come because, while on the one hand it would have been good to see as many people as possible (especially since we traveled 2 hours there and were going to travel 2 hours back to Curahuasi), it was kind of nice to sit back and enjoy the beautiful weather and view while we waited on people to show up.