“They called me urgently to give birth to a baby in Ferreira do Alentejo and I went there of course, I wanted to show confidence. There were some nuns from Misericordia, they used to give birth to babies, and everything ended up going well. In the end, they went to get a bottle A little bitter almond to drink behind the screen to celebrate life in their partner, and everyone was laughing and happy that everything went well but I did not know if everything would go well. I attended some births in Magalhaes Coutinho [maternidade de Lisboa inaugurada em 1931] And I tried to do the same. But if it was complicated…”
“The births were our biggest mystery,” Ana Jorge recalls. “Whenever a woman arrived in labor, the first thing was to try to find out if it was possible to get to Setubal. If it was not possible to do it, we had to do it ourselves.”
The man pecked the chicken
Antonio Lochner was the same age as Ana Jorge when he completed the SMP at Vila Real, Terras os Monte, also in 1976. He speaks of “a kind of waiting room in the SNS” because, although the right to health was written into the constitution that It was drafted and approved that year, two years after April 25th, and the diploma that would form the Syrian National Council was not approved until later, in 1979. “We went in March and the constitution was approved in April, so we had An unprecedented experience at the time – we were the first early SNS employees,” the psychiatrist recalls.
“Before there was the National Security Service, there were already doctors and medical services on the peripheries who were, in a way, the advance guard of the National Security Service.” With some of these professionals, older, working in the private sector, young people faced one of the first and few obstacles to this unprecedented experiment that democratized access to health care and that in three decades has helped lift Portugal from the tail end of the crisis. Europe has the 12th best healthcare system in the world.
Along with 13 other doctors, Lochner's group was the second group to arrive at Villa Real to complete the SMP, so there was already a certain structure installed on the ground by the smaller group they were replacing. “But the previous group was mainly active in the hospital and did not stay there for a year, because it was July and they left at the end of February. “We worked in Vila Real, Santa Marta de Pinaguião, Vila Boca de Aguiar, Ribera de Pena, Murcia, Alejo, And Sabrosa,” he recounts from memory.
Everyone spent hours in the hospital in Vila Real, and after that, “we would go every day in groups of two to do consultations, accommodation and other services in one of these places – and access was not like today, there were no roads, there was and was not Even jeeps or such vehicles traveled on some of those routes. There were cases, for example in Ribeira de Pena, where we could only reach people's homes by donkey.
At first, relationships with some of the local doctors, who were “older” and viewed the young arrivals “with some suspicion,” were difficult, Lochner recalls. Leonor Duarte de Almeida also remembers “a certain initial retreat” of local doctors, “who had been employed for many years and who suddenly saw a group of children appear there, all cheerful, friendly, happy, and eager to work.”
“They thought that we were, after all, agents of April 25, and therefore, we would put it in doubt…Note that doctors were traditionally well-established people in society, owners as well, and some tried to create doubts among the people.” “The population, who then told us…” adds José Manuel Boaveda, current president of the Association for the Protection of Diabetes in Portugal, who completed the SMP in Regingos de Monsaraz and later in the eastern Algarve, between 1978 and 1979.
“Writer. Analyst. Avid travel maven. Devoted twitter guru. Unapologetic pop culture expert. General zombie enthusiast.”
