Tuesday-Have a Coca-Cola and a smile

As a kid, I loved staying outside after dark playing with friends. In Indiana, I would sometimes stay out running full tilt amongst the neighborhood tracks, chasing make believe phantoms and hide-and-seek. In North Carolina, I played until I almost had to crawl home. Play. Outside. A concept sadly lost on most kids today in the U.S., where TV, Wii, Facebook and the danger of abduction or injury lawsuits barely let kids even see the sunset anymore, or exercise the heart.

Because of the weather, and the possibility of evacuating to another, higher and larger hospital if the rain continues and the river pours down into Coya, Guido and Dr. Shaw discussed abandoning the rest of the surgeries, about five of them, for fear that they wouldn’t get the proper rehabilitation in time. When Dr. Shaw went to the families to discuss the situation, the eyes of the parents grew wet. Shaw turned around and told the team all surgeries are on.

I watched a boy today walk for the first time in two years. He had been wheelchair bound since a bicycle accident made him a paraplegic. He has the slightest of sensation in his legs, but only a hint. Todd and Jennifer, prosthetic specialist and physical therapist fashioned a lower body articulated brace with counter lever action and custom fitting. With some help, he was able to stand straight up again and even walked a short distance almost on his own. In the coming months and years, that brace will grow with him and allow him to stand up and read a book, look out a window, motivate short distances-on his own.

Coca-Cola. That's what we called him since it was just about all he would say, and light up when he said it. He had spina bifida (incomplete closing of the vertabra over the spinal cord) and needed some hip work. He quickly became a team favorite with his repeated beverage of choice. I did almost get him to say Dr. Pepper, too.

Roosevelt, 14, was born with a congenial disorder that misshaped his lower legs to bow like rainbows –leaving them useless. Doctors Shaw, Vigeland, and Gallagher sawed and chiseled his tibias like chunks of shish kabob and rearranged them to form a straight leg, and used metal plates that looked like erector set pieces to drill them into the diced bones, giving him straight legs to perhaps one day run with. When his father saw him, he cried pure joy, so did Dr. Shaw.

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A little girl named Nicole came to the clinic and waited days for a corrective hip

operation she will now never have since she was discovered to have a possible heart murmur as well.Since the clinic doesn’t have the appropriate monitoring device to say for certain if she did, she and her mother now have to make the arduous day long journey back home, unfixed. Her mother was heartbroken.

This is such a hard place. We forget how bountiful we are in the states until you come here. There is a fierce beauty matched with a savage wretchedness. Yet, deep green hillsides drape around the region, providing amazing play opportunities for the healthy kids–and perhaps the ones recovering from their injuries.

When I left dinner tonight at 9pm, the courtyard was alive. Children played and yelled and laughed. Tag seemed to be the game of choice tonight.

The Quchuea word of the day is Ama whakaichoo– Don’t cry.

Monday-Humanitarian mission becomes more urgent

Continued rains swelled the river past dangerous levels destroying the Pisaq bridge and stranding us in Coya. The water level reached the power station and shut it down, right in the middle of an operation. The generator was kicked on,but Guido and I went to Calca to get more gas and batteries for the clinic.

We got back and found out the government clinics were closed, so that meant Clinica Kausay Wasi was now the only hospital in the region functioning. No sooner had we gotten back, we found out a truck full of people tumbled down a hillside, killing one and injuring 20. We were no longer a medical team helping kids, we were an ER providing first line care.

Patients rolled in hours after the crash, one man with a life threatening fractured femur and another with a crushed hip. That man screamed out in pain as the doctors attended to him, while his pregnant wife, who luckily was in another vehicle on their way to her scheduled maternity exam, watched helplessly. A woman with her scalp torn off and fractured ribs shook uncontrollably, and a another endured the torture of having her lips and gums sewed in the lobby after being sewed up in the lobby. The serious ones were then sent to a vehicle exchange point at a footbridge to get them to Cuzco. We later found out that they got there, but waited hours, if ever, to be seen from the last report. The way government hospitals work, if you have money, you get seen. If not, maybe never.

Some of us took off to see what the Vilcanota(Urubamba) River was doing. People were digging up soil to fortify the levy protecting their homes from the river, which was above the home level already.

It was amazing to see these doctors drop their mission and switch to a mode not in their playbook. The clinic had an able staff, but the onslaught of medical expertise at hand to help these unfortunate people made a real difference. Today, lives weren’t simply changed, lives were saved by their presence here. Heck, even I got to pitch in. When the lights went off, there was nothing in the OR to see by, so I brought in the Light Panel Micro Pro Photo Supply loaned me last minute to illuminate the room, aiding a critical procedure until the generator started.

The Qechuea word of the day is Oohspoli- thank you.

Sunday-the floods begin

I’ve been trying to wake early to catch the sunrise with these magnificent terraced mountains around us, but its been an act of futility, as each morning has been met with rain showers. Now, this IS the rainy season, so I shouldn’t be too surprised, but what is typically a sunny day, followed by afternoon clouds and evening drizzle, has become an onslaught of showers that threaten the entire region. Since the sky was closed this Sunday morning, I photographed the town plaza which included a 300 year old Catholic church.

At the clinic, two children from the Cuzco orphanage were late. The road to Cuzco was blocked by a landslide and threatened all travel to and from Coya. I got a taxi driver and drove to see the blockage, and the rain-swelled river that carves the Sacred Valley of the Inca. My driver, { } took me to the mud hut community his father and cousins live in in the hills f on the way to Pisaq to get a better view of the river, which was threatening to cut us off from the main route to Cuzco entirely.

A strong river flows down from the mountain into the main river cutting now in between his father’s home and a another. His young cousins were fascinated with my cameras and what I was shooting up their hill, offering me endless advice.

We took off to Pisaq and saw the water already nearly cresting the banks in town, already flooding many houses and businesses.

On the way back, we maneuvered around rockslides that swallowed the highway. In Calca, homes were being evacuated. I photographed two boys wading the dangerous river to retrieve home items. In the next day, that house would be gone.

Saturday

With everyone, including myself finally caught up with sleep (I went to bed at 8:15pm! A record!) the team hit the day with a whopping 8 surgeries.

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Maria Elena is a 23 year old girl who marked a critical benchmark for all the previous missions of this team’s long record. She went in for a hip replacement, a delicate surgery under normal circumstances, where infection can easily kill, and surgeons often wear environment suits to perform it. But here in Coya, the doctors had to operate with what minimal supplies they had–and forego the desired sterilization process, which unfortunately meant me NOT being in the OR. I set up a remote camera that I could control with Pocket Wizards, but had problems with interference on the frequency. I finally had to rely on a wired remote cord that would shoot video clips at regular intervals. I got the footage, but a camera bump, and lousy life battery on the 7D killed the camera before the orthotic was placed.

–Kiara is a 4 year-old girl born with a club foot. She had had a previous surgery to normalize it somewhat, but today’s surgery would give her pretty much a correct looking foot, and most importantly, one that she can use normally. It’s amazing to me watching the surgery. The first cuts you can distinctly see the intricate contents of the foot, and make sense of the architecture of bone, vein muscle, etc. But after 30 minutes, to me, after rearranging, flushing the tissue, it becomes indiscernible, and the true talent of a surgeon is realized as toneless matter can only be deciphered by them.

–Roger is a sweet, happy nine month-old born with 12 toes and fingers, and got surgery to remove the extra four. In just a matter of hours, he is happy and and bubbly, like nothing ever happened. Babies are absolutely amazing.

I miss my Stella.

Friday

Finally got some real sleep. Under the 40lbs of alpaca blankets, I almost never got up. Despite the time difference, I managed to get up at 5:30am to a misty morning. Martha, my host, made bread and jam with coffee.

I was off and running to the clinic.

Organized Chaos. If I wondered whether I would be twiddling my fingers waiting for something to shoot, I would be hard pressed to find another career choice. The clinic was packed with parents and children who, in some cases, travelled for days to get here to receive a small piece of miracle from the One Child at a Time team.

The first surgery was a young girl named Elena who was born with fused fingers and really none of them formed past the first joint. She did have thumbs, however, and the team decided to un-fuse the first and second fingers so she could actually grasp things with it.

She might be able to now grasp food, perhaps hold a pen and draw as she manages to do here in this photo,

and maybe, if she is a little bored one day–

twiddle.

Catching up-Peru bound

Because of the travel and nonstop work and flooding, my blogs are delayed, so pardon the rambling, I will do my best!

I think the hardest part of planning a trip is the actual packing and departure. I have three bags to pack, four if you count the bag I gave to Capitol City to pack medical supplies. But let’s get back to the three I am pulling my hair out about.

My Lowepro backpack will take on my clothes, shoes, and necessities. I think it’s a 170 cu inch bag, so I have ten days of clothes (think synthetics that I plan to re-wear a few times.) Thick hiking boots, ( I am wearing my Nike Free’s for the looonngg plane ride.) My camera equipment belt pack with blister pods, a shotgun butte style steady camera rig for smoother handheld video, my tripod and video head, my nylon sleep sack, Aussie hat, flashlight, Leatherman, monopod, and an assortment of whatever else I already forgot and probably didn’t need but it seemed important to take along at the time.

My rolling camera bag with two cameras, my 300mm lens, 70-200mm, 16-35mm, 50 1.2 lens, 15mm fisheye, 24-70mm and two flashes, radio remotes, infrared remote, two camera strobes, and my laptop, with several power bars.

and finally my shoulder camera bag that has a video microlight, a book on Peruvian history, water bottle with ultraviolet light bug killer, hand sanitizer, toothpaste, and iphone.

Geez, now that I write this, I wish I had just brought an old Nikon FM2 and a few lenses and called it good!

The plan was to go to sleep at 8pm to get a good amount of shuteye before my friend Ron picked me up at 2:30am to go to the airport, but you know that never happened. I pack, repack, vacuum pack stuff and it still doesn’t fit right. I trimmed the clothes down even more, decided that shotgun mike just hasn’t got room, and there must be one more set of instructions for Jenn to follow regarding using the new oatmeal maker or something before I forget. So all in all, I get to bed at 11:15pm, and run inventories through my head (darn, gotta remember to pack ibuprofen just in case!) and probably drift off to sleep at around 12:30!

Yes, the set up to the travel I would say is the real pain!

Met the team at the airport with the huge throng of bags. The plan was to get early, check everything in straight to Cuzco and relax, but when we got there at 3am for the 6am flight, the computers are down, and there isn’t a soul at Delta! Turns out, they don’t come in until 4:30! Journalism 101–hurry up and wait.

When we finally do start check-in, we found out the second checked bag is now and extra $30. Okay, no problem, just have to readjust my finances to absorb that unexpected amount. Thanks Delta, always fun flying the unfriendly skies with you!

I figure the best chance to sleep on the plane is to snarf down some biscuits and country gravy. Airplane food, the stuff of champions! Too bad my eating experience would only go downhill from there.

Pineapple juice, Lima, and lessons learned

We arrived in Lima, Peru just after midnight. We did the zombie walk through customs and of course, my bags of attractive camera gear immediately red flags me to the bag search. Fortunately, everything cleared out, so we walked en masse into the common area that was...unexpected.

Ever since 9/11, airports in the U.S. don’t allow people past a certain point waiting for loved ones to come in. But even when they did, I don’t remember a flight I ever came in on that had what amounted to a small city population crammed in at the security checkpoint like what we walked into. As we walked through, some people would scream and bust out of the line, running to family members on our flight, impacting them with kisses and hugs and tears of joy. I didn’t have time to bust my gear out of my bags as we were coming through, and I was warned repeatedly that bags in the Lima Airport have a curious way of disappearing, even when practically attache to you, so opening my cases in 1000 plus people wasn’t the wisest thing to do, so the only photo I have is burned into my brain.

As we found a safe spot, we met up with our interpreter, Lauren, a 23 year old nutritional advisor from New York who met Dr. Shaw a few years ago in Ecuador, and has tagged along on his missions ever since. We formed a wagon train of bags and fortified ourselves behind them to reduce the chance of the bags growing Peruvian legs and marching off. We broke off in teams to scrounge around for food, massages, phone calls, or just walk the jet lag off.

Our flight was delayed from 5am to 9:40am, and as a result, we were given food vouchers to Dunkin Donuts or Mama Morenas. Some of us felt adventurous and tried Mama since doughnuts didn’t really suit the rumbling belly. Umm..if you ever have the choice–go doughnuts. We got dry and a little suspicious pork sandwiches and stale bread, but that was nothing to the juice. We were told they were from cartons, so Todd and I got Pineapple, and some others got orange juice. Well, one person who finished the orange juice discovered squirming maggots, which incited some squirming from the rest of us. I had taken a few sips of mine and sweated the agony to come. I knew better than to do the juice, but it just sounded so good! Most of us slumped into heaps on top of the softest bags we had and made the best of it. If you have a half body-sized bag, I highly suggest the pose with hands tucked under your back and legs Indian-style laying down, its not that uncomfortable!

We got our flight to Cuzco, and for some reason, I and five other team members scored first class seats. The comfortable, cushy seats eased our minds of the infected juice. Luckily, traveling with a medical team has it’s benefits. Namely, Bactrim. We started a regimen immediately, which didn’t help my nerves when my belly finally started rumbling when we landed in Cuzco.

We departed the plane, and met Guido del Prado, founder of the Kausey Wasi Clinica in Coya. he arranged for several vans to take us and our stuff to Coya. We drove through the tightly packed, ancient looking city that served as the home base of the Inca for hundreds of years before Pizarro devastated the area, and the people. We passed terraced mountainsides lush with a tropical green, and ancient ruins. Coya lies several thousand feet down from 11,000 Cuzco at entrance to the Sacred Valley of the Inca, a beautiful, amazing place.

Rumbling stomach aside, we dropped off our bags at the team’s hotel and we footed it over to the clinic. Hundreds of parents and children patiently waited for us and we jumped right into triage. Some of the people walked days and days to get a chance to be helped by Dr. Shaw’s medical team, up and down mountains that would be an unimaginable journey for Americans to contemplate.

Thank God for the video on my cameras, or I wouldn’t have been able to recount at think on this first day, we were ALL beyond zombie-ism

Sandy, Guido’s wife and an Oregonian, took me over across the courtyard to Martha’s place while I am staying. Martha kind of reminds me of Chachi’s mom in Joannie Loves Chachi. The outside of her home is part of the wall of structures that make up the courtyard. She has a store selling soda and necessities. The inner courtyard has guest rooms on one side, and her home on the other. The rooms are quaint, red and peach walls with a double bed, little nightstand and wood beams more like tree limbs.

The shower is a shower head with an electrical wire sticking out of it connected to a circuit breaker. You turn the circuit breaker and pray it doesn’t get wet!

It was a little to sophisticated for me to figure out, so I settled for a cold shower.