Ma’jo’n
Ma’jo’n is the Tzutujil word for ‘there isn’t any’ and this week it’s been the most common word I’ve heard at the centro de salud.
Coming from the US there are things that I don’t understand immediately about health care here. The centro de salud is a government run organization, and every week sends its requisition forms in requesting the medicines that they need. But they don’t actually always get them. In fact, a good percentage of the common medicines we give out daily we are currently out of. We have been out of albendazol syrup (for treating parasites in kids too little to take pills) since I arrived. This week we ran out of amoxicilin pills, trimethoprim pills and syrup. In fact the only antibiotics we have are donated amoxicilin syrup, donated cipro, and a few courses of a cephalosporin. We ran out of folic acid last week (which we need to give to every pregnant woman) but were luckily able to get some donated.
The donations come from private organizations such as Save the Children, and I honestly don’t know what the centro de salud would do without such donations. But running a clinic with donated medicines has its problems. For one thing, the doctors never know what they have to offer. For another, there coordination between supply and demand is far from perfect. While we have very little in the way of antibiotics we have quite a lot of alka selzer, zyrtec and osteo bi flex.
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