I was sitting in the health post, writing a letter to a friend, when a little man walked through the door in a traditional campo hat; worn brown poncho; rolled up jeans, baggy on this thin frame; thick framed glasses perched on the sun-browned crest of his nose, and bare feet, splattered with dried mud halfway up his calf. Age lines cut across his forehead, etched deep with worry as he explained to Natalia why he was there. His daughter was suffering from fainting spells they couldn't rouse her from. Natalia told him it was epilepsy. The little man demanded pills or syrup or something , becoming more panicked by the moment, his arms flapping and flailing under the poncho, like a little pterodactyl trying to take flight. Natalia tried to tell him that they didn't have medicine for that, and if they did, he would need a DNI (Peruvian equivalent of a driver's license) to receive the medicine for free through the health insurance. He became more upset because DNIs are too expensive. They are about 30 S/., or $10 USD. It was sad to watch., but I had no idea how sad it really was.
Apparently, this man's daughter, the one suffering from epilepsy, is also intellectually and developmentally disabled. I'm not sure the extent of it or the cause, I decided not to ask after my health worker described her appearance as the spanish word for "mongoloid". I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised since political correctness doesn't seem to have hit most parts of Perú, and she didn't mean it in a cruel way, but I was still pretty shocked...
What she did tell me about the daughter, was that she had been raped at some point, and no one knew by whom, and had given birth to a daughter. At first they thought the baby might be healthy, but apparently she has even more problems than her mother. The family struggles to take care of them and can't provide the support they need, but the family is hoping that they will both magically get better.
It was absolutely heartbreaking to hear.
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