Pretty normal morning today, ran, breakfast, and walked to school. Today in class we talked about health care. We talked about how health disparities exist all across the world. A lot depends on each individual’s socioeconomic status. We looked at the differences between clinical and public health. Public health deals with prevention and clinical deals with healing what is happening now. We then took a break and it was my groups’ turn to present about health care in Ecuador. We compared US and Ecuador and they are similar, but yet very different. Ecuador is going through a similar health care reform in that they are trying to make health care affordable for all. We had some good class discussion and overall was a very interesting class.
For lunch, we stayed at the school and had cooking lessons. We made some potato soup, which was delicious, then the main course was beef, tomato and onion salad, and an egg corn dish, and for dessert it was a fruit called babaca it tasted similar to apple cider. I of course only ate the soup and the dessert. It was interesting to see how natural everything is. All the dishes were similar to what our host mother cooks and it was a traditional Ecuadorian meal.
After lunch we were going to visit a public hospital in Cuenca. I was excited for this mainly because I am interested in health care and because we had just spent days researching this topic. We pulled up to the hospital and it looked a little run down in comparison to hospitals in the US. We were given a tour, which surprised me how many places we were allowed to walk through. In a US hospital there is no way we would see rooms, or pharmacy’s at least without signing 45 papers beforehand. The hospital wasn’t very busy, but we later found out that the government is changing the health care system so this particular hospital actually got rid of their surgical area. In comparison to the US the hospital was much less clean, I’m only comparing the appearance. As far as the actual health care provided I cannot say if it is better or worse. The general appearance was just different. It was an awesome experience and I think this will be important to reflect on especially in the future when I continue on to a health care career.
As we were driving back from the hospitals the sky looked very dark. The rain was obviously coming. As we were approaching school it of course began to rain. The three ducklings (Katie, Kelsey, and I) trekked it home in the rain with our backpacks under our jackets looking like hunchbacks. It was a good day. I’m starting to get into a routine and the days are going so fast. As for tonight, probably just work on my final project and get some sleep.
