inspiración

Last week I had the great opportunity to meet my hero. I know some people aren't fond of meeting their heroes because they are sure to not meet their expectations and leave them feeling less than inspired. Fortunately for me, it was quite the opposite. Paul Farmer was here for about 5 days to talk at a presentation that we had for a book that showed 20 testimonials of MDR TB patients who have survived and also talk at a conference on health and human rights. He helped us play hookie from work for an afternoon and got us invited to the conference. It felt great to hear him talk to the audience knowing that we were part of the work he was talking about. Fighting structural violence with our little contributions. Mine might be small like organizing the clinical information from psychiatric evaluations, but I have trust in the rest of the organization that I work with.

One of his talks reminded me a lot of the outreach work at the mental health clinic that I worked at last year. The idea that we need to have a paradigm change in terms of how we think about health problems. We all need to work together to fight to make it illegal to NOT have the right and access to health and basic services. Socios has figured out how to treat MDR TB by going into people's houses, helping them take the medicine, getting it to them for free, helping them with the awful side effects, and helping them socioeconomically as well. At 5 Hall Ave (the mental health clinic), we went right into people's houses, made sure they had groceries, they had paid their bills, and assured they got to their medical appointments. Anyway, keep the up the good work, SMHC crew!

It's time we all start demanding some kind of global change of how we look at health care. I loved my medical anthropology classes in college, but I have to say that I am starting to feel that we can no longer just analyze and study--we have to start acting, too. Analyzing is important to cause real global change, but in the mean time, before that change arrives, we need to fill in the gaps of our current social and health services. Anthropologists need to gang up with health workers and economists and epidemiologists. That's where you come in, Meg!

Ok, I think I have proven that my meeting Paul was an inspiration. He took the 4 of us volunteers out for some pisco sours, told stories, and gave advice. Now we are back to "eating shit for the poor." Less worrying about little complaints we might have. And just because I can never thank you enough--thank you again to all my supporters and readers. It is an incredible feeling to have so many people supporting me. I hope this post finds you all well!