The challenges we must face in the midst of this pandemic, we know well, are many and complex, and vary greatly between countries and social classes. Christian communities, families, parishes, or associations, we also know, are called to carry out prophetic actions that denounce the injustices of our societies, while announcing the paths of solidarity and generosity.
In the parish community of El Rosario, in Mexico City, before the pandemic began, we had already started a drug bank project, with the aim of offering medicines to people in vulnerable situations, promoting donations from the community, and also to channel expired medicines to an institution that destroys them under environmental control and thus remove them from homes, avoiding accidents and that the medicines could end up in the garbage, with the consequent risk and contamination.
The pandemic aggravated the shortage of medicines among the population: massive formal unemployment caused entire families to lose their Social Security affiliation, which here means losing free access to pharmaceutical products. Millions of chronically ill people who depend on drugs to maintain their health were suddenly faced with the need to buy them, at prices that were often unaffordable. Together with them, the people without formal employment affiliated to the free clinics saw how the aid with medicines disappeared as a result of a serious crisis of shortages of medicines caused by the political context.
In the parish office we have witnessed the growing number of people who have approached us in these months with their prescriptions looking for all kinds of medicines, especially to treat chronic conditions, which often mean the cruel and impossible dilemma between investing the scarce economic resources available in medicines or in food, payment of the rent, or other basic needs. Thus we have seen diabetic patients who have been without insulin for weeks, epileptics with repeated seizures since they stopped taking medication, and a long list of complex situations.
As demand increased, we were also able to expand the network of individuals and parishes who pledged to promote drug donations from those who no longer use them. And so, discreetly and anonymously, bag after bag, the medicine bank has been nurturing itself to be able to fill an average of 400 prescriptions per month, 5,000 since the pandemic began!
Solidarity initiatives are successful when they are supported by the generosity of people, who respond to the real needs of the community. Our small bank of medicines is a witness to the fact that, box after box, even medicines can multiply in the midst of a pandemic.
