La Rinconada: Medical Care for Miners at the Top of the World

It's become a running joke among Project Suyana members that each year Dr. Ivan says he'll take our group to La Rinconada – a mining town about 4 hours from the city of Puno – but it never happens. This year he kept his promise and a simple overnight trip to "The Highest City In the World" proved to be an eye-opening experience for us all.

  

The purpose for our visit was to help Dr. Ivan at a medical clinic he founded there a few years back. His motivation in opening this voluntary operation has much to do with the ailments that go along with living and mining at 16,700 feet (mercury poisoning, altitude sickness, etc. ), but perhaps moreso to do with the utter lack of care and resources the city possesses.

 

The lack of organization in electrical
wiring is just one of many examples
of the infrastructural shortcomings
in La Rinconada.

No formal sanitation management
system exists, leaving residents
more prone to toxic waste.

                    

According to National Geographic, La Rinconada's population has skyrocketed in the past 10 years to 30,000 people (a surprisingly large number for such a remote location) and only 4 doctors exist for the entire population.

And so one of Dr. Ivan's mantras – "We need to help as many people as we can" – seems to have no better application than to this city in such dire need of both immediate assistance and guidance for the future.

We arrived on a Thursday afternoon and immediately made the sludgy trek to a mining company's home base. Dr Ivan introduced us to the head engineer and said he is the only employer in La Rinconada that goes out of his way to take care of his workers. We then got situated in a small room that the mining company sets aside for Dr. Ivan to perform medical check-ups for the miners.

Clément, Erin, Jon, Melissa, Thibault, Clare, and Ken
await the arrival of a new wave of patients.

First, we used a pulse oximeter to measure hemoglobin levels, followed by blood samples put in a centrifuge to measure hematocrit. Dr. Ivan would then give a personal diagnosis to each miner with recommendations on how to adapt every day habits and in some extreme cases would suggest medication that could be bought at a local pharmacy. 

More advanced attention was given to miners with dangerously high
hematocrit percentages. For example, over 80% of the volume of this miner's
blood consisted of red blood cells. A normal level is between 40% and 50%.
Despite this bad news, the miner was jovial and in good spirits.

In total, we saw over 50 miners across the two-day period with ages ranging from 17 to 54 years old.

One of the most rewarding takeaways from our time in La Rinconada was how proactive the miners were in seeking out an assessment of their health once the opportunity was given to them. Coming to the clinic was not a requirement for any of the miners, but there was a line outside the majority of the time we were present.

Although our time spent at the medical clinic was our primary focus,
we also helped install a water filtration system to
minimize mercury levels in the water supply.

A breathtaking couple of days in many ways – natural beauty, exhaustion from the altitude, and odor from the garbage-lined streets all contributed – our visit to La Rinconada certainly wasn't a vacation, but rather an equally enlightening and confounding adventure we won't soon forget.

[Written by David Riva | Photos by Clare Toeniskoetter and Melissa Masserang]