43. The rude disappointment

The illusion of having a technological institute in Santo Tomas became a life objective of Don Roberto, the husband of Doña Mercy, the alternate assembly member, but the government of President Corredor had created a large, heavy, inoperative bureaucratic apparatus that it entangled and made everything difficult.

SENECYT was filled with an endless number of bureaucrats and each one was a bottleneck, which hindered everything. The months passed after the donation of the land had already been legalized, which to those bureaucrats seemed ideal, but the political pressure of the mayor of Santa Rosa, who was from the government party, motivated the change of location of the project to one of the parishes of Santa Rosa, where the municipality donated land, which had a community police unit or UPC. The Municipality of Santa Rosa used its road equipment to flatten the land, build the sewers, and while that seemed to be going from strength to strength, Don Roberto, one of the loyalists of the president's party, began to deteriorate sharply. He already suffered from diabetes, but terminal cancer was found on him.

Doña Mercy went to the new hospital recently inaugurated by the president in La Esperanza, but to her surprise, as soon as they saw him they sent him to his house to die.

You can imagine -he told the doctor, disheartened by this devastating news- We put money and people, I managed to be elected alternate assemblywoman, the main assemblywoman, turned out to be a corrupt woman who is now on trial, the provincial director of the party is involved in robberies and surcharges in Petroecuador, and when I go to the hospital they send me home. I fought for an article to be included in the constitution so that the state assumes the expenses of patients with catastrophic illnesses, but now they send my husband home so that I don't know what to do when he can no longer With the pains, I took over I'm going to quit the party tomorrow. I know they betrayed us.

When Máxima attended a new meeting of the doctors and dentists of the Health Network, there were changes in the management, a social worker friend of her father, who helped her to work in Santo Tomás, very authoritarian and even feared, because she was rude, but she was a powerful woman at the headquarters of the Red Campesina de Salud in Quito, she assumed the ma

The project of the Technological Institute for fishermen passed into oblivion. As is common in Quito, everything began to move slowly, moving from office to office, from civil servant to civil servant, one and the other tried to stop everything, promises and delays came and went.

- They are not going to do the technological institute for fishermen, they have the president dizzy, they are deceiving him, get ready doctor, a horrible betrayal is coming- was the conclusion of the alternate assembly member, who in the National Assembly, when she went, saw how they changed those of his party.

In the meeting with the new director, Maxima was informed that there was a new rotation of doctors, that the Plaza de Santo Tomás, where she was working would be occupied by another doctor with more years in the Network, that the schedule would change, It would be Monday through Friday from 8 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon.

 She had to go again to one of the distant dispensaries in La Esperanza.

Don Roberto died, Mrs. Mercy, who could be a candidate in the next elections, left her party and Dr. Maxima left the Santo Tomás fishermen's dispensary.

She was able to go to work in El Faro, the town where her father did rural medicine in 1982. In that place, she lived with her mother when they first got married, in that place she was conceived. There, her father, in addition to doing rural work, was doing research on medicinal plants and food, with one of his beloved professors at the University, who was writing about the food that the Spanish found in the Royal Audience of Quito.

The El Faro dispensary was an old house, with no glass windows, only gates that made it look like a prison.

In that dispensary that doctor had worked for whom he felt a great antipathy, whom he called the Almost Cute because he was the ugliest of all his colleagues, but also rude, brutal with his patients, that is why in the town they feared him.

At the Lighthouse, many remembered his father and her mother, because he was the doctor in a very special moment, when one of the worst Phenomena of the Child arrived, with endless rains, rising rivers, destruction of summer roads.

 He was the first doctor to work in the health sub-center of the Ministry of Health, when it was not yet equipped or operational, in times when snakes came down with the floods, there were congas, scorpions, wasps, crabs, or iguanas everywhere.

She went to see the sub-center, today it was a completely different place, much better than the Red dispensary, which actually contrasted with the luxurious Santo Tomas dispensary.