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Hospital Swarm, Iquitos Peru, Amazon Rainforest
from AidJoy on Vimeo.
All footage captured and edited by Mike Bergen
AidJoy (2009)
There are three hospitals to serve well over 1 million people in the Peruvian Amazon.
The Amazon region of Peru is the size of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia combined.
People paddle a dugout canoe for three weeks in order to see a doctor.
This video is the daily scene when the doors of the Regional Hospital open at 6 a.m.
There are close to 3,000 communities in the Peruvian rainforest. The people in these communities are subsistence farmers, hunters, and fishermen who act as caretakers for the largest and most diverse ecosystem on the planet.
Even the most basic healthcare is unavailable to the vast majority of the one-million-plus inhabitants of this region. Because there are no roads in the jungle, the primary form of transportation is a dugout canoe. It can take more than two weeks to reach a hospital. Two weeks is a death sentence for a mother having complications during labor, or a farmer bitten by a poisonous snake.
* We have heard too many of these stories.
** We have decided to do something about it.
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