¡Feliz día de la madre!

Today is Mother’s Day in La Paz. It is a very special day here: there are signs and hearts and people selling cakes and flowers everywhere. It seems to me to be more like Valentine’s Day than Mother’s Day with how many boxes of chocolate I have seen in the grocery store. Yesterday, Tania had some friends over for tea and cakes, which was really nice. Tonight we are going out to dinner as a family.

We were finally able to make it up to El Alto today. We had been trying for some time last week but were unable to due to the blockades. El Alto gets a pretty bad rap in La Paz. Most of the people we have run into have said that it’s dangerous and we shouldn’t even go up there as a group without someone who knows the area. El Alto is a relatively new city and continues to grow much faster than La Paz because it is flat and has room to extend.

The university that we visited in El Alto, la Universidad Pública de El Alto, is also very new, only having been created 12 years ago. We met with some people from the School of Medicine, which itself is only 8 years old. They took us on a tour of the campus and I was very impressed with the buildings. Everything was very clean and there were soooo many windows to see the beautiful views of the mountains. Even though it is so young, they have been able to grow very rapidly, especially considering their lack of resources and money. UPEA is now in the process of constructing a medical school campus. We were able to tour one of the buildings, where they were actually holding class even though the building won’t be finished for at least another two years.

The thing I was most impressed with about the School of Medicine at UPEA was their commitment to the community. El Alto is a pretty poor area and around it, the rural areas lack essential resources, one of them being access to medical care. UPEA has several buses that they drive to these rural areas, one of which has room for 3 or 4 medical consultations and minor surgeries. There is also a bus for odontology and veterinary medicine. The doctor said it’s very important to them to try and cut the distance between the medical resources that are available and the people who live in the rural areas. I think this could be a pretty cool opportunity for telehealth projects in the future like ours. Being able to connect people who live in these rural areas telephonically to help them manage their diabetes, hypertension, and other diseases could be a pretty awesome thing.

Despite all the negative comments we have heard about El Alto, it is a pretty special place. The people there, at least those working at the university, are very passionate and excited to be there. It was a pretty unique experience for us to see the university in the midst of its creation. Hopefully the establishment of this university will help the city to gain some credibility.