lifestyle

Volunteers from America
photos by Gale Cellucci

If you have no private health coverage and you're not on Seguro Social, the Instituto Oncologico Nacional, now housed in part of the old Gorgas Hospital complex, is where you go for cancer treatments. That means that plenty of desperately poor folks from remote places come to the city, and these people will not have the money to get a hotel room. 

Sometimes the patients are so sick that they're hospitalized, but they need the assistance of a relative and that person needs a place to stay. One example is that some old timers from the nation's very poorest region, the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca, never went to school, never had a formal job and speak only Ngabere, so they need somebody to who knows both that indigenous tongue and Spanish to translate for them.

The Casita de Mausi in Ancon exists to provide these needy patients and from time to time their helpers with a place to stay, and also serves as a center for art therapy and other programs to help in their recovery.

At the moment the Casita de Mausi, house number 608 in Ancon, is undergoing a much-needed renovation and the patients and activities have been moved to the First Baptist Church while the work is being done. It is expected that the place will be ready sometime soon after the holidays.

The date to move back was surely pushed forward by a few days when the USS Rodney S. Davis called at Rodman recently. Organized and coordinated by the American Embassy's people to people program (Emily Boland in particular) and the Navy League (especially Hunter Schultz), the sailors did a hard day's work on the renovation job and donated some tools, furniture and sanitary supplies toward the cause.

If you have labor, materials or money to donate to Casita de Mausi, contact Gale Celluci.

Fixing the wrought iron windows


New doors

 
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