Bolivian Doctors Fighting For Socialism

[polly7]

By Andre Vltchek

Tuesday, July 03, 2012

http://www.zcommunications.org/bolivian-doctors-fighting-for-socialism-by-andre-vltchek

.....Hundreds of local women have come to the square to register their babies and children inside the provisory tents erected by the government. Most of these kids were born out of wedlock; something that would be just a few years ago deplored by society, even considered immoral and shameful. Things are changing now and fingers are pointing accusatively in different directions, while the state is trying to register everybody regardless of how he or she came to this earth, as without the proper registration, children and adults have no right for government assistance.

In 2005, Evo Morales became for the first time the President of Bolivia and despite some vicious and determined resistance and attempts to destabilize his government from both the West and the ranks of Bolivian elites, things began changing rapidly for this nation with the greatest indigenous majority in South America. And “The Process” never stopped, never even slowed down........

.....And here, what stunned me was the trust – absolute and powerfully expressed: between the mother and the doctor, the nurse and the woman and between all of them and me. It took me just a few seconds to explain what I was doing here. We exchanged polite greetings. I asked whether I could film. “Yes, of course”, all of them nodded. It was up to me to set the limits. I was expected to be discreet, but I was not told to be. It was understood that all of us were gathering here for an important reason: to help Bolivia and its people. The doctor was probably Cuban, and the nurse was local. I did not ask; it did not matter. A true internationalist should not care much about one’s geographical, cultural or other roots.

What mattered though was that right in front of my eyes something that would be unimaginable just a few years ago was suddenly taking place: in once impoverished and racially divided and classist Bolivia, a white man, a doctor, was looking with simple warmth and human compassion at a suffering indigenous woman breastfeeding her baby, asking her “When did you feel pain the last time, mother?”......