29 The broader challenges facing native American and rural communities throughout Latin America are omnipresent in Bolivia. Nine out of ten rural households are poor.
Indigenous people have little access to modern medicine.
Outsiders who were lured there in the early 1980s by profitable coca crops pushed the indigenous population to inaccessible spots near the Chapare and Ichilo rivers. MSF has been working to improve health care in the area since April 1999. Educational outreach covers basics such as hygiene, water, nutrition, mother and child health care and sexual education. New toilets are slated for the schools, and water systems for communities that have none. In neighboring Mizque, also in Cochabamba, MSF helped organize and manage a health care district for some 35,000 Quichua.