Daniel MacIsaac
Northern News Services

NNSL (July 14/99) - Dr. Kerry Telford's view of the Canadian health-care system just got a shot in the arm.

The Yellowknife physician recently spent a month touring factories, businesses and hospitals in southern Brazil and came away shocked by the South American country's struggle to provide even basic medical care for its millions of citizens.

"The trip has made me appreciate Canada's health-care system so much more," said Telford, "and will make me fight harder to preserve it." A general practitioner at Stanton Regional Hospital and the Family Medical Clinic, Telford travelled to Brazil along with four other Canadians as part of a program run by Rotary International.

Telford said she heard about the Rotary project through Stanton orthopedic surgeon Jim Corkal.

"He went on an exchange to India 10 years ago and said it changed his life," said Telford.

"I saw the trip as an incredible opportunity -- the purpose was to build international friendship and promote understanding and, through that, world peace."

Telford said the group, led by a Rotary representative from Alberta and including an Alberta engineer, social worker and education administrator, spent four weeks visiting the four Brazilian cities of Itu, Algudos, Piracicaba and Santa Barbara. The tour started with an eye-opening look at the country's biggest city, Sao Paulo, with a population of 18 million.

"I was horrified by the poverty and the people lying in the streets and the filth and the density," she said.

Telford said the country's two-tier system of health care was equally uninspiring. She said that while she found private hospitals and clinics relatively modern and clean, they were financially out of reach for the vast majority of the population.

Telford added that with the state paying physicians only $1.50 to see a publicly insured patient, there was little economic incentive to care for the poor.

"The public hospitals were far more crowded and not at all modern," she said, "and the staff was curious to hear about Canada and was in disbelief about how many resources we have available, They were astounded by the concept of welfare or social services."

Telford said she found an even bigger contrast between Brazil and Canada when she accompanied a local doctor to the favelas -- cardboard-house shanty towns -- outside of Algudos.

"There was no running water and there were dirt floors," she said.

"This particular city hired a medical team to got out to the poor people twice a week -- it was only two hours a week for a large population, but it was an effort."

Rotarians reach out

Lawyer Austin Marshall is a member the Yellowknife Rotary Club, which chose Telford to go.

"Applicants, like Kerry, didn't have to be Rotary members -- what we were really looking for were good representatives of Yellowknife," he said. "Our past experience has been that the people who've gone on the cultural exchange open the way for us to have some lively and productive contact with clubs in other places and to offer them our support."

Certainly, despite the hardships she witnessed, Telford described her Brazilian experience as positive and the people as generous and said she even managed to brush up on her Portuguese.

"They have a very beautiful culture and like to live well and love a lot," she said, "and just when I thought they'd already been so generous with their time and hadn't much else to give, they gave more and more -- and presented me with a necklace made from blue Brazilian stone...it just made me cry."