photos!!

one of the gals on my trip has a huge amount of photos up http://flickr.com/photos/lmholmes/ at this address, the first 20 pages are all of our first week together.
They include the airports, the churches we stayed at, a tv broadcasting station we saw, a cacao plant, the rally we went to, and many pictures of the city.

Yesterday we all went to Barrio Adentro, which means into the ghetto. It is a public medical center, one of 50 in the town we are in, all under the title Barrio Adentro. They are funded by oil money through the government (so when your oil prices go up more people get health care). Of the 50, 17 are larger with many specialties, such as eye doctors, dentists, ultrasounds, xrays, cardiac centers, and many others, the smaller ones deal with more everyday issues, and emergencies. doctors also go into the communities door to door, and to community centers, as well as schools to provide service to as many people as possible. these doctors are all from Cuba, and they are teaching venezuelan medical students to take their place.
I asked if they had rape victims come in, and they told me they don´t deal with social issues, only physical problems.... same with eating disorders. They do however have extensive counciling programs for peopel with cancer, aids and other serious health issues.

Today we talked with a group called GIGESEX, a gender research group, of scientists, doctors, journalists, lawyers and students. Awesome group, dealing a lot with domestic violence, also with sex education in schools, and self image problems amoung girls. Venezuelan woman are supposed to be the most beautiful in the world, a hard standard to live up to. They have the highest per capita plastic surgery rate in the world, along with perfume and makeup sales. these purchases never go down when the economy goes down. They also have a program to promote men to participate as family members and be active parents, which is a big problem in Latin America, but an issue that even the government has taken on with a Padres de la Communidad program.