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The Limits of a $1: Health Care |
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For more on what life is like for the 829 million women who live on $1 a day or less visit WomenThrive.org/dollaraday.
| As Americans debate reforming our health care system, it's easy to forget how much harder it is elsewhere. In addition to weakening bodies and minds, preventable illnesses are major contributors to world poverty. They keep families from working and prevent children from going to school, weakening entire economies. As with most symptoms of poverty, lack of health care frequently hits women the hardest: they are often the last in line for medicine or treatment.
| | A pharmacy in Tactic
| This September, Ritu Sharma, Women Thrive Worldwide’s President and Co-founder, traveled to the rural region of Tactic, Guatemala, one of the poorest countries in Central America where she attempted to live on approximately $1 a day (or 8.3 Guatemalan Quetzales (Q)), the definition of extreme poverty. Ritu documented the lives of three Mayan women - Margarita, Dorotea, and Eluvia - who survive on that amount everyday (visit WomenThrive.org/dollaraday to read her diary, picture album, and interviews).
| | Ritu holding 1 anti-fever Acetaminophen tablet
| After developing a nasty fever and cold, Ritu discovered that she had to choose between food or medicine: one anti-fever Acetaminophen cost 1Q (12 cents), an eighth of her daily budget. Two of the women she stayed with, Dorotea and Eluvia, told her that frequent colds and flus often kept them from working as subsistence farmers or weavers, further limiting their already meager diets. According to Eluvia, a 54 year-old mother of five, "When my husband and I are sick we really cannot sustain the family because we don't have the money to buy food or tortillas. Sometimes we survive on chili pepper." | In order to see a doctor or buy medicine, Eluvia and Dorotea would have to walk three hours by foot or pay 10Q, about half of her family's daily income, for a 30-45 minute bus ride to the town center of Tactic. Once there, one consultation with a doctor (not including medicine) would cost them 100Q ($12.00), twelve days worth of income. As a result, when they or their children get sick, they must treat themselves with wild herbs they gather from the hillside.
Unfortunately, lack of health care is not unique to women like Dorotea or Eluvia. It is a global crisis:
| Dorotea preparing herbs she gathered from the hillside | - Indoor smoke from cooking over a fire is responsible for half a million of the 1.3 million annual deaths due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) among women worldwide, a chronic condition which is treatable in the United States.
- Almost 99% of maternal and 90% of neonatal mortalities occur in the developing world.
- Every day, 1,600 women and more than 10,000 newborns die from preventable complications during pregnancy and childbirth.
| What Can a Dollar Buy in Health Care in Tactic, Guatemala?
| The 10Q per ride truck that women in Tactic must
take to get to a doctor
| - Most of a truck ride from the mountains to the doctor OR
- 5 minutes with a rural doctor OR
- 8 “Panadol Anti-Gripal” tablet (anti-fever Acetaminophen pills) OR
- ½ a small packet of tissues.
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Photos By: Mckenzie Lock, Women Thrive Worldwide
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 13 October 2009 )
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