Four days in the jungle!

So, I just got back from my tour to the jungle. We left on monday morning with a little van, one of those little tin cans that hold 12 people on those tiny little foldable seats. Needless to say that the roads are horrible, so at the snail pace of 25km/hr (hip, hip, hoera for the ecuadorians who work in meters, km/h, kilos and many other useful units!) we reached the town of Guayaquazil after 5 hours or so. We stopped on the way for many cows, rivers, trucks that blocked the road because they missed their turns, heavy rains, mudslides, etc...a real adventure! We had lunch (man, those people eat a lot of meat...even for a carnivorian like me, it is a little hard to handle...I dream about vegetables in all their forms and colours...red tomatoes, orange carrots, green brocoli, sounds wonderful!))...So after lunch the team headed out to the village of Chumpaias. The team consists of 2 ecuadorian surgeons, 1 anesthesiologist, a general doctor (all 4 ecuadorian doctors), Dr. Laub, a stanford plastic surgeon, apparently once the best plastic surgeon around, but now a sweet, but oh-my-god-sometimes-so-embarrassing grandfather, 3 Ecuadorian medical students, Khai(the other stanford student) and me...a pretty cool combination of people.
Often during the first 5 hours of the trip i was thinking to myself 'my god, what am i doing here and how am i going to survive', but then little by little, i warmed up to these people, and i have to admit that they were a pretty fun and entertaining group to be around...i would even go to the extent of saying that i'll miss them in the coming days...

So, we got to that village, and first thing they did was putting us in plastic chairs around the basket ball field of the town. We on one side, they (the people form the village) on the three other sides. Then came all the important people for a speech...the head of the village, Miss Chumpaias herself!, and some others i don't remember...at the end of all the ceremonies, Miss Chumpaias, came around with a big bowl with some yellow fluid in it, and according to the tradition we were to drink from this bowl one by one...the yellow thing is fermented yucca juice...BERK! more horrible than beer...and even worse, I found out later that this juice is produced by the women of the village by chewing yucca and spitting the chewed yucca parts in a bowl...berk and double berk! Anyway, i survived!
Once the ceremony was over each of the doctors picked a student to go to the different consultation rooms to see the patients and decided which cases would get surgery and which wouldn't...so i got my first lesson in patient consultation...man, man, you see weird cases in those villages (a lady was there because her boyfriend had cut her (accidentally ?) with a chain saw!). This went on for all the afternoon. By the time we got back to the hotel we were pretty exhausted and headed to bed...

Next morning, wake up at 6 o clock (ouch, i thought i was on holiday), back to the village, where surgeries would start at 7:30am...I was allowed to watch the first surgery (and all the ones that followed) and before even starting, i felt a little light headed...at some point i had to sit down, the truck (i forgot to mention that the surgeries take place in aa bog truck that has an OR in it) was spinning a little...i felt a little dissapointed, i thought that i would at least make it to the bloody part of the surgery...but the lady anesthesiologist explained that everybody goes through the same thing, something about being in a tight space with funny smells...i guess she was right, because the cutting and burned smell of flesh did nothing to me afterwards, on the contrary, i must admit it is pretty exciting and cool stuff!

Annnnyway, as the day went by i saw them perform 6 surgeries, and for the last one, the surgeon asked me if i wanted to scrub in...euh...scrub what? Sure! So i got to do the cool things they do in the movies...scrub my hands and arms up to my elbows, enter the operating room by pushing the door with my butt, having someone put a sterile gown around me, put gloves on, and then hand over the tools as the surgeon asked : 'retractor', 'knife', clamps,...and even hold the retractor...pretty cool!

That was probably the coolest part of my trip so far...of course the cuba libre happy hour (or happy hours), the salsa dancing (after the cuba libre ;) on tge main square of Quayalaquiz were pretty fun too...

I rediscovered my love for latin america, the language, the people, their sense of family, their warmness...it's amazing over here...I will have to come back soon!