Clinic for poor: waiting rooms fit to overflow with bodies unable to afford to be ill. Years of holding concern cracked plastic chairs. Over tired faces like inherited jewels, fluorescent lights hum.
With generic medications and expired samples, they see fifty patients where private practices see fifteen, administering miracles. Choosing between prescription and groceries changes what twice daily means.
No one comes for preventative medicine. You show up when it becomes impossible to ignore symptoms, when suffering exceeds embarrassment of charity, when fever won't break. Simple issues have developed into intricate crises then.
Still something lacking in luxury hospitals is here: democracy of suffering, strangers connected by shared incapacity to pay for health. From need grew community, dignity persisted in spite of mechanisms aimed to rip it off.