Chapter 2: Not my place to say.

It occurs to me that one can either run a clinic or one can work in one. You can't do both. If you do both you will fail as my boss is failing.

He sees maybe four patients a day. Six at most and that's stretching it so far I can't even see the edges. He takes time out from seeing patients to call random people on the phone. Hell, sometimes I walk into his office and the patient is just sitting there, looking confused, as Dr. Galbis is on the phone with some government agency he's trying to get money from. This isn't right. And it's driving me crazy.

Dr. Guzman works here at the clinic. He sees around ten patients a day, sees them on time, and does all his own filing which is great for me and Jenny. I appreciate that he's younger than Dr. Galbis and that Dr. Galbis works only half the day, but I get the feeling that if Dr. Galbis gave himself over just to seeing patients he could be a lot more effective than he is. Or if he just gave himself over to running the clinic smoothly everything would be a lot better. But he doesn't.

You can see people start to understand this as they come through. In my short time I've seen a bunch of Saturday and weekday volunteers come and go (we go through them like, I don't know, dish towels or something) and they all start out punctual and hopeful and expecting everything to be run well. But it's not. And this is why La Clinica is mentioned four times in the Wash Post and we aren't. Because they're running a much tighter ship than we are. And I'll bet you the head of La Clinica doesn't take patients.

It's not my place to bring this up. I've ben here only since June and I probably don't actually know what I'm saying, but it's like someone's trying to run a race, keep track of all the people in the race, and fix the race track at the same time. You can't do all three. You're going to get run over.