Xeabas, Lago de Chicabal y El camino a ruina
Sorry I haven´t written much this week. The medical program went in full swing last week and I´m catching up on sleep at the moment. Last week I spent two days in the Pop Wuj clinic doing triage (vitals etc) and two days shadowing Dona Ana. This week, there is a foundation that is sponsoring a Medical Brigade. The foundation helps fund the Pop Wuj clinic, and the brigades consist of about 25 pre med students and doctors. We are going to various villages around Xela this week to provide medical care to some of the poorest communities in Guatemala.
One such community, Xeaba, was hit hard by hurricane Stan back in 2005. It is recovering, but just received running water this week. The village is an indiginous community that speaks Kitsche, just one of the several Mayan native languages. We arrived this morning after an hours drive high into the mountains. The volcanos in the distance pierced the clouds as the morning was unusually sunny for the rainy season. We drove into the village in four buses, and the locals stared at us as if to say, ¨here come the gringos¨. The brigades make their way to the village here several times a year, so we are a common site.
We set up the clinic in the school as kids played basketball outside. Little girls ran around, shooting hoops in their native dress against a backdrom of hillside farms and volcanos. We were about 8,000 feet above sea level. I helped Laura and Josef (the German husband of Pop Wuj´s Doctor) do intake of patients. The interesting thing was, however, that just about every person in the village has the same last name of ¨Guachiac¨. We would ask, what is your name?, and we would get the response ¨Antonia Maria, Guachiac Guachiac¨. In Indiginous Guatemalan society, each person holds the same last name of their father and mother. In this case, all are pretty much named Guachiac¨. This goes back to when the Spanish conquered this village hundreds of years ago, and named everyone Guachiac. I guess it makes for a close community, but boy was it hard to figure out people´s medical history and charts. To make matters even more entertaining, some were named ¨Gaurchiaj¨, which sounded exactly the same when pronounced in Kitscen.
Many of the locals spoke no Spanish, so we needed translators to translate from Kitsche to Spanish. Most of the people who came were women and children. They loved to crowd around the table and really wanted to look at the charts, some of which had people´s pictures in them from the previous visit. At times they helped me find people´s names, but most of the time they were laughing at how badly we spelled the name ¨Guarchiaj¨ and the first names of their friends and family. It made for a good laugh.
I lent some kids my camera to take pictures of the girls playing basketball. It quickly created a commotion, and one of the boys was having a real blast snapping the camera every 5 seconds. A small boy, about 2 years old kept jumping in front of the camera to get his picture taken...
The volunteers were all really great, though I couldn´t help but get a little creaped out when one doctor started pushing his Christianity on a patient by saying ¨when you have anxiety or are scared, just pray to Christ¨. Granted, most of the people in the village are either Evangelicals or Catholics, but I still felt like I wanted to throw up on the guy. I don´t really believe that one´s own religious beliefs belong in a clinical or hospital setting....
Overall it was a great day, and a lot of fun. I really love doing relief work and working with communities like the one in Xeabas.
Tomorrow we are going back to Dona Ana´s community to bring the brigades to her area. It is really needed as Dona Ana does so much work and really needs the medical support. Last week when I visited her for a second time, I came back on the bus to Xela. I thought I was lucky to catch one of the fancy mini buses with a video inside. These buses usually have a Mexican singer that is dressed like Liberace singing with a 200 piece orchestra. The bus driver was really into the video programming, and kept strategically changing the channels to make sure our videos suited his tastes. As we turned a corner, he changed the channel, and as a result lost control of the bus. The bus started screeching, and suddently hit the center divider (which is only about a foot of the ground). Luckily the bus got stuck on the center divider, preventing us from driving into oncoming traffic and off a very steep cliff. As we all sat there completely stunned as to what had just happened, I turned to the guy behind me and said (Tuvimos Suerte) Translation: We were lucky. His response was ¨Si, too much cerveza!¨(referring to the driver).. We laughed. I got off that bus and started walking down the freeway till another bus picked me up. Everyone on the bus was fine, except the bus driver, who I am assuming will lose his job for being too addicted to Mexican music videos....
On Saturday the shool organized a trip to San Martin, a small village at the base of a volcano where a sacred lake sits (Lago Chicabal). This village has lots of new construction of fairly big houses by Guatemalan standards. Considering 30% of the GDP in Guatemala comes from workers who go to the US and send money back, it´s easy to see what the economic dynamics in this village are. Most of the men go to the US and send money back to the families to build houses and buy land. The difference with this village, is that many of the older men who have stayed, still dress in traditional Mayan dress (which consists of a white skirt like robe and embroidery).
We hiked up the volcano which was probably one of the most difficult walks I´ve ever done. The air was thin due to the altitude, and it becomes exponentially hard to hike up hill as your body gasps for oxygen. We reached the top to the lake where a ritual was being performed. The lake is one of the most sacred spots to Mayan culture. It is prohibited to swim in the lake, and legend has it, that if you do, you will disappear. My teacher said that once two young men from Xela disappeared while swimming in the lake. He think that probably some Mayans killed him for disrespecting such a sacred place. Mist covers and lifts from this magical place. It sits at the top of a a body of water that feels like it is disappearing. As we slogged our way up and down the hill back to San Martin, we would pass small children carrying 50 lbs of wood on their backs (a common site in these mountains). People were trying to cultivate the land, cutting down the forest for firewood, and causing major landslides as a result. Considering the average indiginous woman has between 5 to 8 children, it is no surpise that Guatemala has one of the densest populations in Central America. It is a country the size of Lousiana but with a population of 13 million. The land really reflects it. Wherever there is a road, there are deforested plantations of clutivated fields, landslides, or mines. Multinationals have come in, but also, locals are largely responsible for the deforestation of the hills for wood burning.
Laura, who works with Pop Wuj, was talking this morning, that whenever she goes and does the stove project (a project that Pop Wuj does to help local people use less wood and therefore take the pressure off of forests), she asks the women if they want more children. One woman she asked, actually ended up getting birth control because of her conversation with her. She said that it´s really just about having one-on-one conversations with women here. Many of these women don´t want a ton of kids, especially the ones that aren´t super religious. Their economic and educational situation has meant that they haven´t had a lot of choices. It really is just a matter of education about birth control etc. Ronnie, one of my teachers, also said that when given options, women will choose to have fewer children because the economic impact is so great otherwise. I think when I come back, I´d like to do work in this area with the local women, so that they may find they have some options.
I volunteered in the clinic last week as well, which was really enlightening. Clinics like the one Pop Wuj run are really important, because the only other free option is the public hospital in Xela. Laura gave a talk last night about the statistics with the public hospitals and they were nothing short of horrifying. On average, one nurse has 100 patients in a ward. Basically, if you are poor in Guatemala, you do not want to end up in a public hospital. I couldn´t imagine what it would be like to be that 1 nurse with 100 critical care patients on a ward. That would have to be the worst job in the world.
We had a lot of patients come in with respiratory and gastrointestinal problems. There were a few with diabetes, and others who had been hit by cars! One poor guy hadn´t gotten any medical help since a car hit him a month ago. He could barely move. His neck and left torso were so stiff I had to help him take his jacket off to get his blood pressure. Being poor in the third world is no piece of cake. You are vulnerable to every element from hurricanes to cars, and very few people are going to help you. That´s what makes these free clinics, and the work of people like Dona Ana so important....
I´m here for another week, and hoping to learn more Spanish so that when I go back and start nursing school, I can be of better service to the amazing immigrant community that makes its way up from Central and South America to work the fields, clean the hotel rooms, and do all the dirty work that most Americans don´t want to do. All this, while they provide for their poverty stricken communities back home. It really is amazing when one considers the level of stress and responsibility hanging on immigrants in the US. With a little luck, I´ll end up back here in Guatemala some day. I´ve really loved it here.
One such community, Xeaba, was hit hard by hurricane Stan back in 2005. It is recovering, but just received running water this week. The village is an indiginous community that speaks Kitsche, just one of the several Mayan native languages. We arrived this morning after an hours drive high into the mountains. The volcanos in the distance pierced the clouds as the morning was unusually sunny for the rainy season. We drove into the village in four buses, and the locals stared at us as if to say, ¨here come the gringos¨. The brigades make their way to the village here several times a year, so we are a common site.
We set up the clinic in the school as kids played basketball outside. Little girls ran around, shooting hoops in their native dress against a backdrom of hillside farms and volcanos. We were about 8,000 feet above sea level. I helped Laura and Josef (the German husband of Pop Wuj´s Doctor) do intake of patients. The interesting thing was, however, that just about every person in the village has the same last name of ¨Guachiac¨. We would ask, what is your name?, and we would get the response ¨Antonia Maria, Guachiac Guachiac¨. In Indiginous Guatemalan society, each person holds the same last name of their father and mother. In this case, all are pretty much named Guachiac¨. This goes back to when the Spanish conquered this village hundreds of years ago, and named everyone Guachiac. I guess it makes for a close community, but boy was it hard to figure out people´s medical history and charts. To make matters even more entertaining, some were named ¨Gaurchiaj¨, which sounded exactly the same when pronounced in Kitscen.
Many of the locals spoke no Spanish, so we needed translators to translate from Kitsche to Spanish. Most of the people who came were women and children. They loved to crowd around the table and really wanted to look at the charts, some of which had people´s pictures in them from the previous visit. At times they helped me find people´s names, but most of the time they were laughing at how badly we spelled the name ¨Guarchiaj¨ and the first names of their friends and family. It made for a good laugh.
I lent some kids my camera to take pictures of the girls playing basketball. It quickly created a commotion, and one of the boys was having a real blast snapping the camera every 5 seconds. A small boy, about 2 years old kept jumping in front of the camera to get his picture taken...
The volunteers were all really great, though I couldn´t help but get a little creaped out when one doctor started pushing his Christianity on a patient by saying ¨when you have anxiety or are scared, just pray to Christ¨. Granted, most of the people in the village are either Evangelicals or Catholics, but I still felt like I wanted to throw up on the guy. I don´t really believe that one´s own religious beliefs belong in a clinical or hospital setting....
Overall it was a great day, and a lot of fun. I really love doing relief work and working with communities like the one in Xeabas.
Tomorrow we are going back to Dona Ana´s community to bring the brigades to her area. It is really needed as Dona Ana does so much work and really needs the medical support. Last week when I visited her for a second time, I came back on the bus to Xela. I thought I was lucky to catch one of the fancy mini buses with a video inside. These buses usually have a Mexican singer that is dressed like Liberace singing with a 200 piece orchestra. The bus driver was really into the video programming, and kept strategically changing the channels to make sure our videos suited his tastes. As we turned a corner, he changed the channel, and as a result lost control of the bus. The bus started screeching, and suddently hit the center divider (which is only about a foot of the ground). Luckily the bus got stuck on the center divider, preventing us from driving into oncoming traffic and off a very steep cliff. As we all sat there completely stunned as to what had just happened, I turned to the guy behind me and said (Tuvimos Suerte) Translation: We were lucky. His response was ¨Si, too much cerveza!¨(referring to the driver).. We laughed. I got off that bus and started walking down the freeway till another bus picked me up. Everyone on the bus was fine, except the bus driver, who I am assuming will lose his job for being too addicted to Mexican music videos....
On Saturday the shool organized a trip to San Martin, a small village at the base of a volcano where a sacred lake sits (Lago Chicabal). This village has lots of new construction of fairly big houses by Guatemalan standards. Considering 30% of the GDP in Guatemala comes from workers who go to the US and send money back, it´s easy to see what the economic dynamics in this village are. Most of the men go to the US and send money back to the families to build houses and buy land. The difference with this village, is that many of the older men who have stayed, still dress in traditional Mayan dress (which consists of a white skirt like robe and embroidery).
We hiked up the volcano which was probably one of the most difficult walks I´ve ever done. The air was thin due to the altitude, and it becomes exponentially hard to hike up hill as your body gasps for oxygen. We reached the top to the lake where a ritual was being performed. The lake is one of the most sacred spots to Mayan culture. It is prohibited to swim in the lake, and legend has it, that if you do, you will disappear. My teacher said that once two young men from Xela disappeared while swimming in the lake. He think that probably some Mayans killed him for disrespecting such a sacred place. Mist covers and lifts from this magical place. It sits at the top of a a body of water that feels like it is disappearing. As we slogged our way up and down the hill back to San Martin, we would pass small children carrying 50 lbs of wood on their backs (a common site in these mountains). People were trying to cultivate the land, cutting down the forest for firewood, and causing major landslides as a result. Considering the average indiginous woman has between 5 to 8 children, it is no surpise that Guatemala has one of the densest populations in Central America. It is a country the size of Lousiana but with a population of 13 million. The land really reflects it. Wherever there is a road, there are deforested plantations of clutivated fields, landslides, or mines. Multinationals have come in, but also, locals are largely responsible for the deforestation of the hills for wood burning.
Laura, who works with Pop Wuj, was talking this morning, that whenever she goes and does the stove project (a project that Pop Wuj does to help local people use less wood and therefore take the pressure off of forests), she asks the women if they want more children. One woman she asked, actually ended up getting birth control because of her conversation with her. She said that it´s really just about having one-on-one conversations with women here. Many of these women don´t want a ton of kids, especially the ones that aren´t super religious. Their economic and educational situation has meant that they haven´t had a lot of choices. It really is just a matter of education about birth control etc. Ronnie, one of my teachers, also said that when given options, women will choose to have fewer children because the economic impact is so great otherwise. I think when I come back, I´d like to do work in this area with the local women, so that they may find they have some options.
I volunteered in the clinic last week as well, which was really enlightening. Clinics like the one Pop Wuj run are really important, because the only other free option is the public hospital in Xela. Laura gave a talk last night about the statistics with the public hospitals and they were nothing short of horrifying. On average, one nurse has 100 patients in a ward. Basically, if you are poor in Guatemala, you do not want to end up in a public hospital. I couldn´t imagine what it would be like to be that 1 nurse with 100 critical care patients on a ward. That would have to be the worst job in the world.
We had a lot of patients come in with respiratory and gastrointestinal problems. There were a few with diabetes, and others who had been hit by cars! One poor guy hadn´t gotten any medical help since a car hit him a month ago. He could barely move. His neck and left torso were so stiff I had to help him take his jacket off to get his blood pressure. Being poor in the third world is no piece of cake. You are vulnerable to every element from hurricanes to cars, and very few people are going to help you. That´s what makes these free clinics, and the work of people like Dona Ana so important....
I´m here for another week, and hoping to learn more Spanish so that when I go back and start nursing school, I can be of better service to the amazing immigrant community that makes its way up from Central and South America to work the fields, clean the hotel rooms, and do all the dirty work that most Americans don´t want to do. All this, while they provide for their poverty stricken communities back home. It really is amazing when one considers the level of stress and responsibility hanging on immigrants in the US. With a little luck, I´ll end up back here in Guatemala some day. I´ve really loved it here.
posted by Mr. Sophie at 5:07 PM
1 Comments:
another good post, thanks for taking the time to write, it's really interesting.
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