LETTERING:
Anapu River, Portel
Pará state, northern Brazil

NAME:
Catherine de Sousa Rocha
MSF health promoter

INT:
We are on the Anapu river, which is one of the widest rivers in the municipality of Portel.

It's wide and there are a lot of access barriers.

The houses are very far from one another.

It's hard to reach communities at the farthest points of the Anapu river.

LETTERING:
In July 2021, the MSF mobile clinic brought COVID-19 antigen testing and essential care to 390 people living by the Anapu river.

NAME:
Gilberto da Conceição

iNT:
It's a very difficult place.

We often arrive at a health post and find there are no medicines. Then what?

Sometimes we have a fever, headache, vomiting, diarrhoea, and we come here and there aren’t any medicines.

NAME:
Maria Rosinete Monteiro

INT:
When it's a serious health problem, you either leave and go to Portel or go straight to the cemetery.

Because there is no other way.

You have to order a boat.
When it's something serious, you have to get a boat.

SCENE:
- "I'll give you two medicines for the pain, OK?"

NAME:
Eduardo Rugani
MSF medical doctor

INT:
What impacts these people the most is the lack of access to healthcare, in general.

Medical doctors usually only come here through social or charitable initiatives.

Health posts are often managed only by a nurse technician.

So, MSF is here to guide, treat and care for them... in addition to helping control COVID-19.

We are here because of COVID-19, but also to offer healthcare, in general, to these communities.

SCENE:
- If you have had contact with the virus and get it on your face, mouth, eyes or nose, you are putting the virus inside you.

INT:
Being able to talk, to pass on information and guidance that I know will be important in people's lives is also gratifying.

Every person who has been reached and may take this information forward and continue what we did here; it's something incalculable.