Oil And Cancer In Ecuador

A woman in a pink dress appears beside him. "Yes?" she asks warily, peering at us, two foreigners. "We're looking for Maruja Garrido," I say quickly. "We're journalists, looking to interview people who have cancer." Photographer Lou Dematteis and I had just come from the village health center where a doctor had given us her name. The woman's eyes moisten. She hesitates. We wait. Then she motions to her teenage daughter to fetch two plastic chairs, and we are invited to sit on the porch. "I am Maruja, I'm 35, and I'm in the third stage of colon cancer," she says flatly. Then she tells us her story. She has sold her farm to pay the medical bills. Twice, she has taken the serpentine 10-hour bus ride up the Andes Mountains to Quito, the capital, to the only cancer hospital in the country, to have chemotherapy. She is supposed to go every 28 days, and, after chemotherapy, she'll start radiation. Her doctors won't tell her what her chances are; they just tell her to return. "My husband had an accident. He can't work now, he's deaf. I have five children, and I run our store. If something happens to me ... ." She doesn't finish the sentence. Her husband, the shirtless man, wanders over to look at us. Their children cluster around the counter. A customer comes inside and buys a Coke, then stays to listen. Maruja's story is typical of those we heard as we searched one year ago for people with cancer in the Oriente, the Amazonian region of Ecuador. URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/12/11/ING6CFBDNL50.DTL _©2005 San Francisco Chronicle_

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