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For the professional, This geographical situation historically determined the precariousness of life in these islands From the low presence of both provincial states, which hinders the implementation of health policies. Rateni has been in charge of health promotion and prevention projects for almost ten years and after the Coronavirus pandemic began to tour the Paraná Delta with other teachers and students from different careers. “When we talk about access to health, we refer to housing, access to water, roads, there are many issues”he explains.
So close, so far
The wetland of the upper delta of Paraná is immense: about 17,500 square kilometers, which is equivalent to 97 times the extension of the city of Rosario. Once or twice a month, the teachers and students of the five races travel part of that labyrinthine surface, the other shore that extend between the towns of Puerto General San Martín and Villa Constitución.
In all this journey they relieve the reality of eleven schools that group communities between ten and fifteen families. And while the situation of each differs, little access to health care is a shared problem.
The Argentine Patagonia school is one of the schools that will visit that sunny Thursday that starts very early. In the only classroom, adorned with portraits of heroes, alphabet of colors and maps, a dentist, Adriana Ruiz, reviews the oral health of students and their families and advanced students of psychology instruct about the use of condom in a class of sex education. The school has ten students who are attending from the initial level to the third year of high school.
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“Access to health is one of the main problems of those who live on the island. There is no place where women can control their pregnancies, small babies, the winter respiratory conditions of the boys or the ailments of the people MayR “, says the director and only teacher of the school, Cristina Muñoz. The teacher arrived on the island known as Boca Las Piedras three autumn, looking for a new challenge for her career.
The beginning was difficult. “It was May and I never went so cold, but I liked the community, my students, their families,” he recalls, and in the end he stayed. He turned the school patio into a game place, with a garden. As the Port Workers of Puerto San Martín Apadrina La School, he got a salamandra, fans and useful for the boys. Also financing of an international renewable energy program to install solar panels. “It was a change of 180 degrees,” says the teacher and confesses that the next goal is to have a medical dispensary.
>> Read more: Paraná is already in less than one meter and the downspout will follow all the fall
Another downer, new problems
Life on the island is marked by Paraná’s pulses. The river provides its inhabitants of water, work and, above all, is the main route of communication. Therefore, each downer is a problem: internal channels are practically dry and many areas remain isolated. And the river level drop is increasingly frequent: in 2020 it reached critical levels, becoming the most acute and prolonged downer since there are records, in the past spring put at risk the provision of water in the city of Victoria and this autumn retracted again, reduced to one third of its average height for these times.
“The means of transport of those who inhabit the wetland is the canoe or the boat, because many times the distances are long and the roads do not exist or are risky due to the presence of vipers“, says Florencia Grillo, Undersecretary of Extension of the Faculty of Architecture of the UNR and participant of the extension project in the wetland.
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The architect takes care of Relieve living conditions on the island: water quality, infrastructure needs, how waste, landscape conditions and connectivity are handled, among other things. “The downspout of Paraná, added to the consequences of the dredging, complicate communication,” he points out and recalls that the inhabitants of the islands made numerous efforts to request the dredging of the mouth of the streams.
“In some cases, the little water flow complicates the arrival at school. The same goes for health care. In emergency situations there is no place where they can get fast, the road extends due to the lack of water in the streams. Prefecture usually helps in emergency cases, but there are schools that have more than two hours of boat to get to Victoria O Rosario, it is a long time for something serious, “he says.
The School No. 41 Angel Piaggio, is almost on the edge of the channel that bears the same name. Piaggio was a sub -prefect of the port back in 1898 and was an expert connoisseur of the wetland riachos. That coincidence led him to discover a faster way to connect the cities of Rosario and Victoria by water, delving the channel of the Campaña stream. The work was carried out and currently the channel is named.
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However, With the downspout of this fall, which put the paraná below the subway in the port of Rosario, by sections the channel was reduced to a thread of water. “So that the spicy can come to school, bring merchandise, or water drums, we have to leave the canoe and drag it about 200 or 300 meters, until you reach an area where there is water,” says Javier Hereñu, director and teacher of the Angel Piaggio school. The only one of the students who arrived at school that Thursday, Juan a six -year -old baby, listens to it. It is the way he makes every day with his dad so as not to miss school.
The teacher recalls that in the province of Entre Ríos there have already been several files requesting the dredging of the entrance to the channel that he already lost, he calculates, two or three meters high. “With the dredging of the main river channel, the water circulates faster and the sand accumulates in the accesses to the riachos that are drying,” explains the teacher.
His student is accommodated in one of the banks in the center of the classroom, near the desk of the director and the library that overflows with books by authors such as Salinger, Cortázar or María Teresa Anduretto, and tries to decompose numbers of various figures in hundreds, tens and units. “Our interest as teachers is that our students have the same possibilities as the boys living in the cities,” says the teacher who has been working in island schools for more than 20 years.
“In the wetlands, fewer and fewer families live, young people go to cities to lookhe counts and considers that it is a way to overcome the difficulties that life has on the island.
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For the teacher, The isolation and difficulties of accessing health care are the most urgent.
