Ship a healer for poor communities on Colombia's Pacific coast

THE SAN RAFFAELE, Colombia - As a white ship chugs through the muddy waters of the San Juan River, pirogues from the jungle glide toward it almost reverently, bringing their sick to healers they liken to angels.

For hundreds of miles along Colombia's Pacific coast, with its thick, lush jungle, there are no hospitals, and medics and medicine are rare.

And so, the San Raffaele hospital ship, when it arrives, is treated like a ghostly miracle by the poor indigenous and Afro-Caribbean communities that dot this region.

"The proper medicines are not coming in. They are too expensive," says Yenny Cardenas, weaving a basket as she waits in her hut, which is built on stilts over the riverbank. Its roof thrums under heavy rain.

Cardenas, an ethnic Wounaan, is waiting to board a skiff that will speed her across to the ship with her baby boy, her fifth child. She's worried about his skin which, for months now, has been covered in sores.

"My son was fine, nice and chubby, but now he's not eating," said Cardenas, 44, a teacher in nearby Balsalito, an indigenous reserve on the banks of the San Juan.

On the other bank is the wharf at Docordo, a majority Afro-Colombian town lost in the country's poorest department, Choco - where nearly 50 percent of the population live in extreme poverty, compared with 17 percent nationally.

Dozens of patients have gathered around Docordo's wooden wharf since dawn. The area has just one medical dispensary, supplying 16,000 people.

For that reason, all eyes are trained on the ship. Bearing a white cross on its hull, it's anchored mid-river, as if honoring its neutrality between these two neighboring communities - indigenous and Afro-Colombian - which do not mix.

People line up, waiting their turn to be seen by the doctors and nurses. Some have their hands on their stomachs, some are bent over with age, some are young pregnant women with their kids in tow - all wait to tell their woes and receive free treatment. Locals call the medical staff their "Angels of the Pacific".

"Some of these people have not been able to see a doctor for years," said Ana Lucia Lopez, 51, director and co-founder of the Monte Tabor Foundation, which operates this 24-meter hospital on the water.

On Docordo's teeming pontoon, Lopez manages the anxious crowd from behind a school desk on the wharf that doubles as the hospital's reception area.

For a 12-day mission she has a list of 2,000 people for appointments and 150 patients for surgery that a forward party of medics screened in a triage operation two weeks previously.

It's a mountain of work for the little ship with a big heart, but on Colombia's west coast, there is no alternative.

The ship features 25 doctors and nurses, some paid and some volunteer, including a gynecologist, a dentist, a pediatrician and a psychologist. A crew of seven operates the ship itself.

Hailing from the port of Buenaventura, the San Raffaele has been plying the 1,300 kilometers length of Colombia's Pacific coast all year round since 2009, from the Panamanian border in the north to Ecuador in the south.

"Already over the past few years, 65,000 people have been seen and more than 4,000 operations have been carried out," said Diego Posso, 49, a paramedic expert in trauma and the founding president of Monte Tabor.

Agence France - presse

(China Daily 05/11/2019 page7)