Going Tribal - Cocamillas

I spent three months living with Cocamillas -belonging to the Tupi-Guarani linguistic group- in the Amazon basin of Peru. For my rural internship I had selected the most remote district hospital I could find, in Lagunas, in the lower Huallaga valley.

I brought drugs I knew a rural hospital would not have, even heparin, and globulin serum against tetanus. Possibly due to my inexperience, that failed to translate into better survival for a case of neonatal tetanus.

I soon realized that that town was renowned in the province, local chieftains came to heal from chronic, severe ailments. But they came to see traditional healers, not me. People had been left for long periods of time without a physician and everybody felt qualified to treat common diseases or selfmedicate. I managed to treat some complicated cases such as obstructed labor. I had experience with laboratory procedures and was skilled at improvising - lacking an incubator, I resorted to use the patient's armpit as one.

Rather than spending time at the bar with mestizos, I liked to hang out with cocamilla villagers. I learned their trades, how to make an alcoholic drink fermenting cane juice in a hollow tree trunk where a large number of maggots floated. I would go with them and use nets and hooks to catch fish. Mestizos laughed at me when I returned proudly with fish some regarded as unedible.

Spanish nuns ran the school and helped at the hospital. I asked if they recalled a time of famine. They told me that a decade earlier, a US-based corporation drilled for oil in the area. Food cost exploded, men went to work for the oil company but spent their wages in beer and hired sex, and women and children were unable to continue slash-and-burn agriculture.

I did not charge anybody for my services, and paradoxically that did not get me any respect from the locals. They expected the local physician to be generous, tipping everybody and donating to every worthy cause, perhaps failing to realize that money would have to come from their own pockets had I chosen to charge them.

The day I left, the girl I was dating complained loudly I did not have sex with her. My coworkers from the Health Centers rolled their eyes and sent nonverbals "I told you". That incident reminded me of the Polynesian girl in "Mutiny on the Bounty" complaining of feeling rejected for the same reason.