JP doing medical work!

This week the clinic where JP is working, which is right behind the chapel where we live, asked him for his help in an important medical undertaking: disposal of expired medications. Now, in the states, when I worked at a shelter and our residents left their old medications, we could just return them to any pharmacy and they would manage their disposal to avoid possible dangers like putting drugs in the water supply by flushing them down the toilet or bad reactions if someone found the old meds in the trash and took them. I have no idea what the pharmacies actually do with the meds after we drop them off, but it seems like a good system.

Here in Peru, not so much. According to Gloria, the nurse who manages the clinic, at the hospitals they just put their old stuff in the trash. She is not a fan of this idea as it would lead to the same types of problems we would imagine in the state -- people taking the old drugs and getting sick, or getting hurt or infected by used syringes. So, as an alternative, at the clinic when the old meds build up, they set them on fire!

Since JP is the jack of all trades at the clinic, he got to be the one to dig the big hole, put all the meds in it, buy the kerosene, and actually light the fire. The doctor did come over to supervise (some things are true cross-culturally). I stayed away from the fire but did snap a few photos for proof:

I missed the hole-digging because I was at school, so here is JP in the afternoon dumping medicines into the big hole he had dug.


And lighting the fire:

And letting it burn for hours (there were lots of syringes with plastic in the fire):