For Martin Vergara, community doctor
[Hacemos un paréntesis en nuestra serie «Introducción a la salud comunitaria» para insertar el concepto de «espacios de vida y espacios de atención», que complementa muy bien lo expuesto en nuestra pasada entrega sobre los ámbitos de la salud comunitaria, y que le escuché por primera vez al doctor Martin Vergara. Este es el texto que nos regala para el blog, como respuesta a mi invitación a compartir este valioso concepto que señala la gran diferencia de reflexionar y actuar poniendo en el centro los espacios de atención o los espacios de vida. Javier Segura del Pozo]
The idea of the termliving spaces
” it is not mine. I don’t have the reference or the article, but I remember that I found it in a Brazilian article, in Portuguese, that was part of a set of articles on primary health care. I did not invent the term, but it helped me to express with it, better than with any other, what I did and what I wanted to do in community work. On the other hand, I had familiarity and sympathy with the subject ofterritory, fruit of my regular contact with Professor Guhl in his geography classes and on field trips. I was never his formal student, but I appreciated his teaching and he transmitted to me the passion to understand the “face ” of the territories, as a place where thethe real life of people and communities
.The notion of “living space” thought in contrast to the notion of “attention space ” seemed somehow familiar to me. I confirmed the idea that the territory is not only the place where things happen, but also What pass, when pass, with who occur, what are the ties of confrontation or proximity that are established, what are thelinks of power
etc. On the other hand, I had been uncomfortable, for a long time, with the use of the expression extramural yextrahospitalario ; a term that considers the hospital as the epicenter and the rest as secondary or subsidiary, whenthings in real life are backwards . Then I understood more clearly, that the living spaceIt is the space in which life arises and reproduces itself., with all its vicissitudes including health, illness and everything that human life entails. The complementary toliving space” is he “attention space ” and the relationship between one and the other is given as the relationship between strategy and tactics. In it attention space Sometimes life is at stake, but in the living space
The daily practice of community work of Dr. Martin Vergara in «the spaces of life»: collective drawing of a local map in Dominguillos (Cauca) I have to point out that the living space refers to thedaily life . Various readings helped me in this regard, including Agnes Heller’s considerations on daily life and the developments of the anthropologist and theologian Lluís Duch on thereception structures
. I believe that the most decisive thing to assume this category of “living space “It is the fact that I have dedicated many years, it could be 25 or more, accompanying the people in the District of Aguablanca, to the east of Cali. This experience generates not only knowledge but also social recognition and a communion of destinations. We settle as life companions, of joys and misfortunes of what happens in the territory and with its people. It is configuring another way of looking and relating
that requires, moreover, broader reflections. Using your expression a bit put the boots on, I would say there are two movements: put the boots on to go to the territory and the other consisting of think and work with people they don’t put on their boots because they live with theboots on
.
» I found another source of conceptual discomfort in the sharp separation that is made betweenpromotion and rehabilitation . When I started working with the patients in Agua Blanca in the gardens, at home, and in other types of activities, he told me: “this can be called rehabilitation, but this can also be called promotion.”
It evoked a bit of the image that musicians use when talking about enharmonic notes; what for some may be a D sharp, for others it may be an E flat. Both sound the same, but they are two ways and two structures to approach the same thing. Dr. Martin Vergara is a community doctor. He graduated from the National University of Colombia. At Solivida (“Solidarity for Life”), a small non-governmental organization made up of professionals and community leaders from the Aguablanca district (Cali neighborhood, Colombia), he is the
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