Information Overview

The FRANK S. BECK HOSPITAL, ANCORAIMES, BOLIVIA

Advance 1 005078 - SRA

The Frank S. Beck Hospital is the only hospital in the Ancoraimes area and serves as the center for a census-based, impact-oriented public health care program which is administered by Andean Rural Health Care in partnership with the Bolivian Methodist Church. It provides primary and secondary health care to Aymara families in 51 small surrounding villages.

The Beginning

Traveling on a used motorcycle, he began making trips to different mission centers on the altiplano (the high plain between ranges of the Andes mountains where Ancoraimes is located.) He took with him Nestor Penaranda, a Bolivian Methodist pastor, as translator.

Most local people did not realize just what a doctor could do for them. Their centuries old customs dictated that they take their sick to the "yatiri" (the learned one) or try to cure them at home with herbs and rituals, a few of which appeared to be effective. They accepted it as inevitable that more than half of their children would die in childhood and that most of their adults would die in the early decades of life. They also had a distrust of white men, due to centuries of exploitation from the Hispanic population. Word got around that this white man, Frank Beck, was different. He obviously wanted to help them, and besides this, his medicine worked. The response to the medical work among the people was very great. When they learned the doctor was to pass down a certain road on his motorcycle, they would come bringing their sick, sometimes walking for a day, and stop him along the way.

Eventually, he spent more and more time in La Paz as he started and gave leadership to what was first called the American Clinic and then the outstanding Methodist Hospital and nursing school of La Paz. Throughout the years Dr. Beck went to the altiplano when he could take a free day, and graduates from the nursing school stayed and carried on simple medical treatments. All through those years he held in his heart a dream to start a full time clinic in Ancoraimes.

In 1955, as he prepared to retire for the third time and leave the Methodist Hospital, he determined to build on the medical work in the Ancoraimes area and start such a clinic. Dr. Beck supervised the remodeling of an adobe building on some property in Ancoraimes into a tiny clinic with operating, examining and x-ray rooms, and wired it for electricity. He installed a generator and piped in water. Patients, whose trust in Dr. Beck had been built across the years, started to appear at the door before the Ancoraimes clinic was equipped for surgery. After Dr. Beck's brief sojourn there, the work was continued by outstanding missionary doctors, such as Dr. Pablo Monti and others from Argentina and nurses from Uruguay and the United States.

In late 1963, the Becks returned for six months. An unprecedented event occurred when community fathers from a small lake village came to Dr. Beck and asked that he vaccinate all the children there against whooping cough, a dangerous disease that took the lives of many Aymara babies. The tide had reversed. The Aymara Indians themselves had now asked for preventive medical help. The Becks left Ancoraimes in mid-1964 when Dr. Beck was 76. A succession of fine Bolivian medical doctors carried on the work.

They returned in 1966 to visit mission medical work and went to the hospital he had planned in Ancoraimes which was now finished and named after him. It had twelve patient rooms and a small operating room. Dr. Bill Jack Marshall, who had succeeded Dr. Beck at the Methodist Hospital in La Paz, was now director in Ancoraimes. Under his leadership there had been considerable growth and expansion.

In 1969, Henry B. Perry III, a medical student from Duke University in North Carolina, came to the altiplano on a work team, visited the area served by the Frank S. Beck Hospital, and was deeply moved by the needs of the Aymara Indians. Already determined to be a medical missionary, he decided the altiplano was where he was called to be in mission. Thus was born the seed which grew into the public health care program known today as Andean Rural Health Care (ARHC) in the United States and Consejo de Salud Rural Andino (CSRA) in Bolivia.

In the late 1960's the Bolivian Methodist Church became autonomous and circumstances changed. Indigenous leaders assumed the administration of the church and its programs of education and medical work. The heavy investment of the Board of Global Ministries begun when Bolivia was designated a "land of decision" in the 1950's, lessened. Facing many demands of a rapidly growing church, difficult choices about priorities had to be made. Emphasis was given to education, evangelization, church growth, and some medical work. They found it difficult to secure the financial support needed to maintain, much less expand, the Hospitals in La Paz and Ancoraimes.

In 1981, Henry Perry and his family moved to Ancoraimes to begin the public health care work. After a very difficult beginning, the work began to develop in 1986. At that time Nat Robison, born in Ancoraimes to Methodist missionaries, became and continues to be the country director. He now oversees programs in three geographic areas of Bolivia.

In February 1992 The Bolivian Methodist Church formally requested ARHCICSRA to provide financial, administrative and management leadership in the provision of health care for the 51 villages in the Ancoraimes area. The center for this work is the Frank S. Beck Hospital.

Frank S. Beck's dream that the indigenous people would become responsible for their own health care has been coming to fruition. The CSRA program in Bolivia is carried out mainly by indigenous community health workers who come from the villages of the area.

They utilize the model health care strategy, pioneered by ARHC, which takes workers into every home in every village at least twice a year. Using this strategy they have reached an immunization rate of over 90% and have reduced the risk of death for children under five to one half of that in other areas of Bolivia. Grassroots education focuses on preventive health care measures, environmental concern, and sanitary practices that will prevent needless sickness and death. Since 1992, the hospital itself has been refurbished and upgraded.