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| 1/20/2004 8:39:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article
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| The Lunde family from Joseph – from left, Erin, Bryn, Angie, Peter and Nick – visit Cotopaxi, elevation 16,000, while in Ecuador. Contributed photo |
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Joseph family travels to supply doctor daughter at Ecuador clinic
By Elane Dickenson
of the Chieftain
A small village deep in the countryside of Ecuador has many reasons to give thanks to a community half a world away in Eastern Oregon.
Fulbright Scholar Erin Lunde, 25, a 1995 graduate of Joseph High School and a Harvard College medical student, has been living and working at a nonprofit medical clinic in rural Ecuador since August.
When her parents Nick and Angie Lunde and college-age brothers, Peter and Bryn, traveled from Joseph after Christmas to visit, they took along four suitcases full of donated medical and art supplies and slightly over $3,000 in cash contributions from Wallowa County for the clinic.
“People can really feel good about the direct aid they gave. It went a long way in Ecuador,” said Nick Lunde, noting that 42 individuals and organizations contributed to the cause.
Among the contributions were new syringes from Wallowa Memorial Hospital which were unusable here because of new government standards. “The clinic was almost out,” said Lunde.
The clinic is located in Lay de Laguna, a village of 30 families, and is the only medical facility in region in the “cloud forest” with about 6,000 people total in the region. It was founded about four years ago by a private foundation, and while the Ministry of Medicine Ecuador supports it with supplies, the shipments in are erratic and the clinic never knows what it will receive.
For example, it was supplied with the type of suture needles for abdominal surgeries, not the type suitable for puncturing skin, and a majority of the injuries in the region involves sewing up machete wounds.
In Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, $250 of the money from Eastern Oregon went to buying suturing needles and supplies. Lunde also stocked up on medicines and supplies the clinic needed most: local anesthetics, anti-parasitic medicine, birth control pills and condoms, rubber gloves, Band-Aids, a diabetes test machine and test strips.
“It really, really felt good to go to the pharmacy and be able to buy what she needed out of the kindness of Wallowa County’s heart,” said Angie Lunde.
The trip to Ecuador was a family vacation for the Lundes, and was the first time all five of them had been together in two years. The family, including Erin, spent much of the two weeks sightseeing in Ecuador, with expeditions ranging from a side trip from Quito to 16,000 ft. high Cotopaxi to a couple days on an idyllic tropical beach where they all received sunburns.
Another high point was New Year’s spent in the city of Otovalo, site of the largest indigenous marketplace in South America. In addition to bargain hunting for sweaters, bags and other merchandise, they particularly enjoyed witnessing one of Ecuador’s annual custom. New Year’s is the only time of the year the citizens of the country are allowed to publicly criticize their government, so everyone,makes and lines the streets with effigies of political figures, including people like Saddam and Bush as well as their own politicians. At midnight they throw them all in the middle of the street, and light them on fire.
“You see black patches on streets all over Ecuador afterwards,” said Nick Lunde.
The Lundes traveled to the village of Lay for a harrowing five hours on a major highway and another hour and 20 miles on a muddy dirt road Nick Lunde, a U.S. Forest Service fire officer, said reminded him of one of the less well-maintained roads in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. Drivers in Ecuador were described as “terrible” and Lunde said “the highways have center lines but they are irrelevant.”
Their arrival at the medical clinic, a six hour drive from Quito in a rented SUV with the medical supplies, was met with a lot of curiosity and a crowd of villagers gathered to watch the boxes unpacked.
“The people were all very kind to us and were obviously very fond of Erin,” said Angie Lunde. “It was obvious that she was very respected as a doctor, and she feels very protected there.
As a medical student Erin Lunde was always supervised by experienced doctors, but in Lay she is one of only two doctors, and the one preferred by most women patients because she is a woman.
Lunde received a Fulbright Scholarship to support her year in Ecuador, during which she is researching traditional medicine and the insertion of Western medicine in the traditional way of doing things. Her special interest is women’s health.
“She said after being a primary care doctor for a year, it will be hard to go back and be a fourth year medical student,” said her mother.
Before the Lundes left the village of Lay, members of its health committee gathered to present Angie Lunde with a bouquet of flowers and to thank the family for everything they had done, bringing medical supplies and, perhaps more important, loaning the village their doctor daughter.
“They were very appreciative,” said Angie Lunde.
It’s a long way from Eastern Oregon to a remote village in Ecuador, but one Joseph family and 42 generous Wallowa County donors have made a positive difference there.
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