Babies and Lab Coats and Thoughts! Oh my!

I come to you from my cozy room having just watched the final "I've Had the Time of My Life" scene from Dirty Dancing which was released exactly 30 years and 3 days ago. It left me feeling a little mix of happy, full of that weird sensation of smiling at a screen when you are alone, and nostalgic for my favorite movie that I love to share with all of my favorite people. So the best way to cope with that is to whip out a new blog post and type away my thoughts!

This week has flown by, and I honestly keep forgetting that today is Sunday. The only constant reminder I have are the overly thick packets on architecture and public art theory sitting by my side. Here is to real homework once again, and my brand new pens that I am very much looking forward to using for annotation! Have to use that $50,000 peso "school supply" allowance on something.

The major event in my week came on Thursday, when I, along with Joel, went to the CONIN headquarters in Providencia, Santiago for an internship interview. CONIN (Corporación para la Nutrición Infantil) is an organization that, right from the beginning of our internship searching process, caught my eye. One of the factors that pulled me towards the Tufts in Chile program was the opportunity to have an internship while being here, one that would allow me to interact with more Chileans outside of school and my host family while providing an additional way and focus to expanding my Spanish vocabulary. The moment I opened the CONIN website, I was greeted by a photograph of a young nurse smiling at an infant as she picked the baby up off of an examination table. I went on to learn about how this organization focuses, as its name suggests, on infant nutrition and health. Volunteers work hands on with the babies being cared for at the clinics, which I was really surprised by because I was under the impression that I wouldn't be able to do any actual clinical internship due to the way the Chilean medical school system works. (In the US undergraduates often do research or gain clinical experience while at college or over the summer, but that just doesn't really happen here. Therefore internships are reserved for medical students and/or the internship system just doesn't exist in the same fashion.) But besides completely being drawn to the fact that I would be caring for and feeding and hanging out with babies all day (!!!), I was really drawn to the fact that CONIN clearly takes a bio-psycho-social focus to their practice. All together, it is a pretty darn amazing way to learn about the Chilean health care system (including but not limited to: differences with the US, the types of inequalities that exist, and the systems linked to infantile nutrition) while advancing my medical based Spanish vocabulary and gaining clinical experience. I'm a happy gringa.

As Joel and I walked up to the front of the CONIN building on Avenida Pedro de Valdivia, we were met by metal gates and a very locked front door. Two nurses on a smoke break (gotta love THAT irony) saw our confusion and gestured to come to the locked doorway and ring our way in. After pressing all of the buttons we could and attempting to voice a "hola" into the speaker that was clearly not a microphone, the nurses walked back over to let us in as they smiled amicably when they realized how out of place and semi nervous we looked. We were led around the back of the building into a sitting room where an older nurse wearing a purple short sleeve nurse’s coat greeted us. She had such a high pitched voice and she made me feel so calm. She brought us into a sitting room that was entirely purple (even the coffee table had a purple table cloth) and patiently sat with us as we waited for our interviewer to arrive. We were fifteen minutes early which surprised every Chilean we came across. Our conversation was light and easy as she talked about the time she had spent with her daughter in the US and the fact that we had arrived with the very uncommon snowstorm (seems to keep coming back up in these blogs now don't it??!). She was incredibly calm and comforting and dissolved any interview jitters that occupied my stomach. Before we knew it, the door opened and María Luisa von-Breteinbach walked through the doors and gave each of us a kiss on the cheek before replacing her shoulder padded blazer with a nurses coat (purple of course).

Reenacting these moments in my mind now, I am struck by how much purple is truly the color of my childhood and represents comfort for me. It covered the walls of my Boxborough bedroom and those of my parents room as well. It is the color of the amethyst ring that sits on my grandmother's finger and the color of my favorite knockoff Juicy sweatpants that I got from Limited Too in first grade. I think those suckers were the first and only pair of anything that I shed a tear at when my mother convinced me that I had truly grown out of them and needed to get rid of them. I knew they were too small for a while but was so attached that I just left them hung up in my closet so that I could look at them for a solid year. Thinking about it now, I think they were too worn through to even be donated. If anything summed up third grade more it was those pants and my sparkly ***purple*** retainer.

Our interview was less of an interview and more of a conversation, just as we had begun with the older nurse before María Luisa’s arrival. It was a formality above all, but the time spent in the sitting room chatting allowed me to gain a greater understanding about the mission and day to day work going on at CONIN. The vast majority of the children treated are two months to three years of age all with some kind of nutritional deficit. They live at the clinic and many of their parents come to visit daily. But the clinic also treats infants taken away from drug and/or alcohol addicted parents, which is a leading cause of infantile malnutrition and nutritional diseases in Chile to begin with. María Luisa touched on the process of how these children are sometimes returned to their birth families, but more often than not are adopted from the clinic after age four. But it seemed like an important topic that wasn't given enough attention, so I am very interested to learn more about this specific subset of patients, both about what diseases and medical obstacles they face, but also about how the chilean health care system cares for both them and their families medically and psychosocially.

After our introduction and answered questions, María Luisa gave us a tour of the clinic. My first impression was how small it is, only three rooms with beds and cribs along with one intensive care unit for the sickest children. I thought a lot about my time as a patient and working at Boston Children's and the immense scale of the entire Longwood Medical complexes. The wide hallways intensely lit. The private rooms, each outfitted with all the technology needed. Here, the clinic has three play rooms all with donated toys (it was emphasized that the clinic never buys their own toys) along with a kitchen and some nurses offices and meeting rooms. I felt tall beneath the low ceilings and felt as though I was an obstacle standing in the tight hallway as infants were hurried past in the arms of nurses, some attached to little scuba air tanks and some looking as though they were healthy enough to be discharged the same day. We were quickly introduced to doctors and nurses and other volunteers who I am greatly looking forward to meeting again, actually remembering the names of, and spending lunches together in the small cafeteria. I can’t wait to learn about their stories, how they decided to enter into the medical field in a country very different from my own, and how they found their way to CONIN too.

My adventure starts on Tuesday, August 22nd when I have my first shift. I will be hands on with the babies: playing with them, helping to feed and bathe them, and offering two free extra hands in exchange for an clinical experience that will prepare me for my own occupation down the line. I am incredibly excited and optimistic and open minded about this internship and all of the chilean medical and public health practices that I will learn about in the next four months. Final stop is the medical supply store that I will visit in the morning to buy myself a bright white lab coat that will soon have VOLUNTEER sharpied across the front left pocket.

A week ago, we officially reached one month in Chile. Over a nice batch of very homemade and incredibly nostalgic banana chocolate chip pancakes to celebrate the big One M, I chatted with a group of gringos (or maybe a gaggle of gringos?) about where we felt we were four weeks in to this wild ride. There was a focus on the fact that finalizing classes and getting into the swing of school (ie knowing exactly what time you need to leave home to zoom across the city and switch from a micro to a metro -- without cheating with GoogleMaps -- to make it to class on time) made being here feel more real. But as friends back in the US head back school now too, everything seems a little less fresh, a little more routine, and a little more distant from home. In both Shayna's and Maria's cases, they are missing dropping their little siblings off at college. And I don't mean that finding a routine is a negative. I love feeling settled. I love seeing the same people waiting with me at the bus stop in the morning and having the Mario Kart theme song burned into my mind from hearing it through the walls to my brothers' room. But is there a danger in that comfort? That the next four months will just fly by without me even blinking an eye and it will all be over before I can really even digest the crazy thing I am doing? Orientation was so hectic, but right as that routine was feeling a little too repetitive, we moved across the city and completely changed our environments as we started our home says. Then class started and we needed to find our classrooms and master our commutes and relearn how to set aside time for nightly homework. We are at the point now where there is nothing new, outside of occasional field trips, that we have chiseled into our pre-made Tufts in Chile schedules. Now it all comes down to us doing the exploring, us doing the challenging, and us doing the pausing to take a peek at where we are. What an incredible freedom that is! But the fear of not leaving my routine now that I have it, just like any routine I have in the US, makes me a little scared because the clock is so limited.

Last night at midnight, over some pisco sours and a scratchy microphone, my host mom and a gaggle of gringos sang along to Billy Joel's Piano Man. The one caveat is that it was, in fact, singing along to El Hombre del Piano entirely with Spanish lyrics. It was just different enough that le gringos picked up on the phrases lost in translation, but I was so incredibly happy all belting out a tune that we all grew up with, whether we were on different sides of the US or in two different hemispheres. I was comfortable sitting on a chair in the living room with the warm fake fire blasting behind me. I went to bed all snuggled up with Shayna in my larger-than-twin-bed twin bed (we are perfectly compatible sleep shape sleepers!) refusing to set an alarm, because that is just what you do on Sunday, no matter where in the world you are.

I'm sorry for the lack of pictures, but this felt like a text only kind of week.

Love and miss you all dearly.

xoxo,

Olivia/Liv/Boo

Spanish word of le blog

la manga = sleeve

Something that Joel and I were strictly instructed to NOT have on our white lab coats. Short sleeves with bulky sweaters popping out underneath here we come. RIP my perfect Meredith Grey costume.