I've watched enough tv to know what an x-ray of a broken femur looks like when I see one. In this case, if you knew that people have bones in their thigh, you could tell. The top half of the bone was on the left side of his leg, and the bottom half was on the right. Walking home from school this 14 year old was struck by a car and taken to this far away hospital. He has been in this exact bed for 3 months and has shown insignificant improvement. Think pre-Christmans, maybe back to first semester mid-terms with NO movement. It would cost this boy $125 to have a surgury to fix his leg properly. $125 he doesn't have. At $4 a day this boy owes almost $400 dollars to the hospital - that is not an uncommon salary here. His parents, have not saved enough money to come visit him so he has been alone the whole time. He can't walk, so he can't leave. Definition of forgotten about. Maybe even hopeless.

A was introducing myself to someone when I heard an ear-splitting shriek from across the room full of beds. There was no doubt in my mind, I knew what had happened. Minutes later a nurse rolled a table through the hall with the body of a young women on it.

There has been a violent strike for the past two weeks with workers in the public hospitals. Yes, this has left the poor to die when simple medicine could have healed them.

We were about to leave on the first day of the strike when we saw a woman in an abandoned hallway. We walked up to her and met her daughter (about eight years old) who was in a wheelchair. The story sounded like it was off the tv show House. A few weeks ago her foot start to itch really bad. They figured it was a spider bite until a week later when her foot was still severely swollen. The swelling moved up her calf and past her knee until she had to come to the hospital to have it drained. She has since had five similar surguries on her leg. She got white marks all over her body and her hair fell out in patches. Now she sat with bloody bandages and no chance of finding an answer. Her mother couldn't leave because she owed the hospital $1.50 more than she had.

A woman walked in hunched over after coming out of the public transit bus. Her dress was wet from the waist down and her breath was heaving the way you would have expected for a woman on the verge of giving birth. Unfortunately she didn't know that the maternity ward was closed, that there was not a doctor or nurse in the building and that she would now have to give birth on a bench in the waiting room or in a side hall somewhere.

No comment on my end...