I'll start by clarifying that this reflection is mainly addressed to each and every user of the Haría Health Center. A small health service, like the consultations of those old town doctors that my colleague and admired Fernando Jiménez, a doctor from Teguise, repeatedly refers to. In this consultation, as everyone can imagine, not only do we go for medical check-ups or attend to the increasingly numerous emergencies, but we also listen to the social reality of each and every resident of the municipality. Health Centers or Medical Offices are part of the palaces of the town.
I have spent the last three years examining both the bodies of my patients and the state of mind of the residents of Haría. As a healthcare professional, I cannot be oblivious to the reality of the municipality where I practice my profession, since I would be distancing myself from one of the causes of illness and discomfort: the environment where one lives.
The environment, the locality, the town or the municipality where one lives, determines practically 90 percent of the quality of life of people and societies. Living in cared for or neglected towns, with better or worse services, with accessibility or not to public resources, with many or few areas of shade and biodiversity, or with great or little capacity for economic development, increases or decreases the life expectancy of citizens.
But what is truly fundamental for the quality of life of the residents is governance. It is the style, culture and political system that makes public decisions that concern us all taken in one way or another. Governance is not the government understood as the taking of power for the sake of power, but the way in which that power is exercised.
If a community maintains a deficient, undemocratic governance, incapable of assuming matters of general interest, blocked, corrupt or clientelistic, then the town, city or society tends to deteriorate. There is no greater evil than a governance that rows against the general interest.
And that is what I, as a doctor of that palace of the town that is the Haría Health Center, have noticed in these years. Some neighbors listless, distressed, tense and even demoralized, as a result of a way of understanding municipal governance by the current political representatives far from the challenges and aspirations of the northern town. That is why, and for three more issues that I will explain below, I take a
step into public activity as a way to contribute my grain of sand to this town that has welcomed me with so much affection.
In the midst of this feeling of uncertainty, I was struck by Nueva Canarias' proposal to incorporate a 24-hour Continuous Care Service in the Mala Clinic and to provide the Basic Life Support ambulance in Arrieta with a medical nurse, turning it into a Sanitized ambulance. This proposal, which as you know was approved in the Parliament of the Canary Islands on July 27 by unanimous vote of the autonomous Chamber, was extremely interesting to me not only because it focused on a matter of basic general interest in the north of Lanzarote, the improvement in urgent healthcare, but also because it moved away from the tension of local politics buried in the trivialization of misunderstood governance.
Another important element in making such a decision was the local spokesman for the NC project in Haría, Marcos Lemes. Marcos is my patient, and I already knew his courage and empathy towards people after that tragic shipwreck on the coast of Órzola where he and a group of neighbors had to jump into the sea to rescue those human beings who were drowning trying to reach land. It is not easy at the moment, and an immigrant person says it, to find people who are willing to put their lives ahead to save others. It is not easy to jump into the sea in the dark. And what is extremely difficult is to carry in your memories those you could not save. Marcos represents well that way in which I believe any public activity should be exercised, putting even your body for people, whether they are of any color, come from wherever they come from, and speak as they speak. People just like you and me.
Finally, the Isla-Hogar and Cuidar el Norte project. I was perplexed by the fact that a local political party constantly used the ideas of "caring", "home", "kind", "healing" or "proposing". My perception of politics revolved around extremely different semantics such as "battle", "criticism", "tension", "selfishness" or "personalism". When Yoné Caraballo told me about the collective Isla-Hogar project as an ideal of island, I knew that, if I took the step to public representation, I would take it with them and with the thought that has accompanied me throughout my life, that of caring.
And here I am. Between my medical consultation where I try to heal whoever enters the room; and the conviction that the ideas that we propose from Nueva Canarias are the most sensible to get this wonderful municipality and town of Haría out of instability, disorder and blockage.
Therefore, and out of respect for all the neighbors, and because I know they deserve more and a better future, I will be accompanying Marcos Lemes and the entire team
in the NC candidacy for the Mayor of Haría for the next local elections in May 2023.
So that Haría does have someone to take care of it.
Yamirka González, family doctor at the Haría Health Center and member of NC Haría.
