We stayed in the Hotel Pinocho, as we have on previous trips to Montero, and found it greatly expanded and still clean and quiet.  The staff are friendly and helpful to a fault.  Breakfasts there are always a highlight.  We didn’t eat all our meals there, as we have in the past, because of the busy schedule we followed. 

Tuesday morning we met at the Villa Cochabamba clinic with Dr. Dardo Chavez, Juan Carlos, Miquel, and two Peace Corps workers, Cary Langy and Mark McCracken.  Cary is a recent volunteer who had just completed his orientation training, while Mark was an 18 month veteran who was working in a remote community several hours out of Santa Cruz.  Cary will be our circuit rider in the Montero area, and we couldn’t have found a better volunteer to take on the task!  He is tall and a tri-athlete – no problem carrying the 80 lb. repair kit backpack that Peter had put together.  What’s more, his background is in engineering, so he was not at all intimidated by the technical nature of the repair tasks.  We felt we were putting the project in confident hands.  Mark’s presence was valuable as he helped Susana with translations and offered lots of cultural advice to Cary.

We visited two other clinics in Montero, the Red Cross and C.L.E.M.  Both looked great, and seemed well staffed.  We met a couple from Seattle, he a GP and she an RN,  who had been in Montero for 8 months and had become deeply involved in the community.  A profile of their service work appeared in last month’s curamerica newsletter.

We also had a meeting at COSMOL with the administrative staff there.  The new president, Jose Roca Chavez, is a young, reform-oriented leader with ambitious ideas about providing services to everyone regardless of class.  Later, we attended a delicious barbecue at his dairy ranch outside of town, and saw how COSMOL had expanded services to the rural population in that area.

There was much discussion about the upcoming need for laboratory services to be established at COSMOL.  They have a room ready for the lab equipment, and it must be operational by January 1, 2003.  CSRA is working with COSMOL to get the lab running.  We again talked about the possibility of NCWFP providing technical assistance for this project.  I also enjoyed meeting the young programmer who has been developing a database to track the service records for the clinic.  He has been working on this complex task for two years, and has done an excellent job of creating a user-friendly tracking system for the census-based model.  Some of his work was already in use at the front desk of the clinic, and the field-tracking system was to be implemented shortly.  I was pleased that CSRA had decided to tackle this task locally rather than hiring an expensive company from the States as had once been considered.

Visiting a Clinic in Montero

The Laboratory Room at COSMOL, Waiting for Equipment ...

Jose Chavez Showing Off the Old Fashioned Well at COSMOL

Peace Corps Volunteers Cary and Mark

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