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Pediatrician Yesenia Williams was so shocked by what she saw at an immigration reception center north of the Darien region that separates Panama from Colombia that she couldn’t talk about it – not even to her colleagues.
“I didn’t expect so much pain and so much difficulty,” he recalls.
During his nine days working at a makeshift clinic in San Vicente, Panama, he and his colleagues treated hundreds of exhausted immigrants hiking in the dense jungle between Colombia and Panama.
Listening to their stories, the doctors took a look at the struggle for survival, which has been described as the most dangerous part of the world’s most dangerous migration route, where people cross in hopes of asylum in the United States.
It was the conditions of the children crossing the street that moved Williams the most. Some were so thirsty that their eyes looked sunken.
He remembers that when they cried, there were no tears. Others were so confused that they couldn’t remember their own names.
“They saw things they shouldn’t have seen,” says the pediatrician about the violence and attacks that immigrants face during the transition.
Green Hell
The Darién region stretches across 575,000 hectares of thick rainforest and forms a natural barrier between South America and Central America.
There are no paved roads, no signposted paths to help you cross this lawless land where robberies and rapes are common.
Despite the risks, more and more migrants are traversing the 97km route between marshes and mountains on foot – which can take more than a week.
In 2021, an estimated 133,000 migrants crossed the Darién forest. Of this total, 30,000 were children. Most of those making the dangerous crossing are families from Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela, but Williams says he has seen children come alone.
During their nine days in San Vicente, doctors treated nearly 500 migrants crossing the border and interviewed 70 of them in detail.
handing over children to strangers
Doctor José Antonio Suárez, an infectious disease specialist on the team, remembers caring for a 60-year-old Venezuelan man traveling with his two children, ages four and five.
Image: Getty Images
The doctor thought they were the descendants of the immigrant, but said they were not his family. He said the children’s mother was a Haitian woman he had met in the woods, and that he could no longer walk and asked him to take them to San Vicente.
“The degree of desperation is so great that a parent might hand over their child to a stranger,” explains Suárez.
Horrible death news
Panamanian epidemiologist Roderick Chen-Camaño, who is experienced in working with indigenous communities in the jungle, thought he was ready for what he would face in the makeshift clinic.
“I didn’t think I’d see anything again,” he says, and recalls a Venezuelan immigrant who burst into tears while describing what he witnessed on his trip.
The man claims to be part of a group of immigrants who climbed the mountain range that separated Colombia from Panama when a Haitian woman collapsed. And what happened next stigmatized Venezuela.
Realizing that the immigrant woman was dead, her husband threw one of the children off the rock. And he remembers trying to stop the desperate Haitian from doing the same to his other son, but was unsuccessful.
Finally, the Venezuelan immigrant told the doctor that he also couldn’t stop the Haitian man from jumping into the void.
The BBC was unable to independently verify the migrant’s account, but figures from the International Organization for Migration show that dozens of migrants die each year while crossing the Darien region.
Crossing infected waters
Yesenia Williams says it’s frustrating to see her team do only minimally in the makeshift clinic and alleviate some of the symptoms without dealing with the cause.
“We see only a small part of the immigrant experience,” says the doctor. But Venezuelan José Antonio Suárez is happy to be able to offer at least some help to his citizens.
Most of the immigrants who crossed the Darién region last year were Haitians, but by 2022, Venezuelans are in the majority. Many left Venezuela to try to live in other countries amid the country’s economic crisis in recent years. .
However, the strict quarantines imposed during the Covid-19 outbreak made the job of these immigrants even more difficult. Many are now heading north, looking for new opportunities.
One of the Venezuelan patients Suárez saw at the clinic had unusual irritation of the feet and legs.
These itchy red lesions reminded the 67-year-old doctor of something he hadn’t seen since he was a teenager when he visited the Unare lagoon in his hometown of Venezuela.
Suárez diagnosed cercarial dermatitis, also called swimmer’s itch, to the immigrant and more than 20 people who arrived shortly thereafter. It is caused by parasitic larvae released by snails.
Tiny larvae penetrate swimmers’ skin, causing rashes. They die, but the more the patient scratches the affected area, the worse the irritation, because injured skin can easily become infected by bacteria.
But one is Dr. Pediatrician Rosela Obando Suárez observed that many adults suffer from irritation, but children do not appear to be infected. And by talking to immigrants, they discovered why.
The adults were infected while crossing the many waterways that cut through the Darién region, but the children survived as their parents carried them on their arms to avoid being dragged by the current.
Irritation rarely causes complications, but Suárez warns that drinking water contaminated with parasites can have serious consequences.
The doctor explains that immigrants passing through the Darién region often have no choice. Carrying water bottles will be too much of a burden on your arduous journey, drinking water from rivers contaminated by larvae will cause gastritis, not drinking water will cause dehydration.
‘Moved by the river’
All the professionals at the clinic found a particularly remarkable story.
Biologist Yamilka Díaz says she decided to work in the Darién region after meeting a five-year-old girl named Delicia, who was found next to her mother’s body in the middle of the forest.
Delicia was taken to the institute where Díaz worked for blood tests to identify tropical diseases such as malaria and dengue.
When Díaz asked Delicia if she remembers what had happened, she simply replied that her family had been “taken by the river.”
The biologist says dealing with immigrants has changed his life, and he observes more mundane issues such as rising costs of living more clearly.
“You see things differently,” says Díaz, who left the makeshift clinic barefoot after giving his shoes to an infected migrant.
– This text has been published actually inside https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-62686752
source: Noticias
