“Today is a very special day: it’s our turn to get together with children in the community. We need to vaccinate them to free them from getting preventable diseases. Some of the mothers do not want to vaccinate their ‘wawas’ (children), so we have to talk to them so they understand the importance of vaccines,”.
Dr. Ariel Guzmán Director of the Hospital Ascencio Villarroel de Punata
La Capilla Health Center is a rural primary care service located in the Municipality of Punata, about 45 minutes from Cochabamba, Bolivia. This facility helps locals living in the valleys of the region protect their health.
One of La Capilla’s main tasks is making immunization plans aimed at reaching all children in the community.
An important part of immunization planning is ensuring the participation of community leaders.
Don Lorenzo Camacho Paredes is one of those leaders. Because of him, families from different areas are organized so that vaccinators can go there and respectfully attend to them, and get them to accept the vaccines.
“Those of us in the area coordinate with doctors and recommend that people wait in their homes until the vaccine arrives,”
Lorenzo Camacho, a community leader in the La Capilla area
One of the vaccinators is Vanessa Camacho. She leaves her house every morning to work in the La Capilla Health Center.
“You could say it’s a bit of a sacrifice, because I spend more time at my job than at home.
To get to a community we have to walk long stretches come rain or shine, but we have to get there with the vaccines, not only to achieve the targets, but also to have the satisfaction of knowing that the children are vaccinated,”
Aux. Vanessa Camacho, vacunator.
The Municipality of Punata is primarily agricultural and has a population spread out between the fields of corn and other grains, which make it difficult for households in the most remote areas to access the vaccines.
Some of the families are still hesitant to get the vaccines, some people think that they will get sick due to adverse reactions. However, an assertive conversation and the confidence instilled by vaccinators like Vanessa results in administering all of the doses in all households in the area.
“I’ve been working at the La Capilla Health Center for four years. My father got sick with chronic Chagas disease which is what motivated me to help people. I get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing my kids grow up from little babies and now they are big. It surprises me how many years I’ve been here. Yes, I also interact with the family, with the mothers that I am going to visit, or I get their telephone number. I ask them where they are and the mothers ask me the date of the next vaccination day and checkup, that’s how much the mothers trust me,”.
Vanessa Camacho, vaccinator.
The day ends with the satisfaction of having fulfilled the responsibility of administering vaccines in remote areas.
The respective reports are written up in the health center and everything is prepared for the following vaccination day.
These vaccines are not curative, they’re preventive. We’ve been vaccinating small children under the age of 5 for years. It is now part of life in the health services. However, we must continue to work on raising people’s awareness so that they consider immunization not only as a health service obligation, but as an obligation of parents to care for their children. We need to be vaccinating in the streets, demonstrating the responsibility of both parties, for the good of the ‘wawas’ in the community.”
Dr. Ariel Guzmán.
