Quésia Ferreira makes her way through rubbish and electric wires. In this Rio de Janeiro favela, the nurse goes to meet homeless crack addicts lost in the depths of the “Marvelous City”.
The 28-year-old is part of one of 13 teams of the municipal program Consultorio na Rua (Street Doctor’s Office), which organizes rounds at the bedside of the homeless, a population that has been growing steadily in recent years in the second most populated city. populated in the country.
Doctors, nurses, social workers, psychologists, the teams venture into the places that seem the most inaccessible.
During the first half of the year, they carried out no less than 20,000 consultations.
“This program allows us to bring public health to a population that cannot move around,” explains the nurse, carrying a large backpack filled with medication.
She also brings in her rounds an insulated cooler to carry vaccines against Covid-19 and the flu.
Some of his patients don’t even remember their first and last names.
Bare-chested, a crack pipe in hand, a 41-year-old man recounts his tragic fate as a trilingual engineer who fell into drugs after traveling the world for a long time to work on offshore oil rigs.
“I’ve been on the streets for five years. I used to drink a lot when I worked at sea. One day, after leaving the platform, I looked for the nearest place where I could get some crack, and I didn’t I never came back“, he confides, preferring not to reveal his identity.
“When crack enters your life, there is no way out,” he says in his makeshift camp near the Jacarezinho favela.
In another popular area of ??Rio, crack users are out of sight, under a bridge, near an open sewer, a polluted stream where sewage is discharged.
This rubbish-covered site is nicknamed “the cave” by health professionals, and “Baghdad” by some of its inhabitants.
One of the women who frequent it had to leave her home after being the victim of domestic violence. She later became a drug addict.
Smiling, glasses with golden frames on her nose, she greets each member of the Consultorio na Rua team with a warm hug.
“They are everything to us. After God, they are the ones who take care of us,” said this 30-year-old whose name was not mentioned for security reasons.
For Yasmine Nascimento, a 33-year-old doctor, caring for the homeless is a vocation.
“For me, medicine is an exchange. With the Consultorio na Rua, I manage to create a link with patients,” she says.
Of the 6.2 million inhabitants of Rio, nearly 8,000 people lived on the streets in 2022, according to figures from the town hall, an increase of 8.5% in two years.
02/09/2023 08:34:41 – Rio de Janeiro (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
