Week 1:
Location: Quiche, Guatemala
Altitude: 7,000 feet
Season: Monsoon
Jason:
We arrived at our destination (about a 6 hour bus ride from Guatemala City) set high in the beautiful mountains of Guatemala Tuesday evening and unloaded our bags in the middle of a rainstorm. Thankfully the rain stopped while we set up camp. I’m really liking tent living here because it is so cool in the higher altitude so I’m enjoying it while it lasts! It rains almost every afternoon and evening here so it’s always muddy and everything is so green and beautiful.
Our team is working at the hospital right next door to where we are staying and we guys are doing maintenance type things and the girls are helping care for patients. It’s been good to get back here in Central America, feels like a second home in a way for me. The challenges of this month mainly are finding enough of personal and couple time since our entire squad is together for this month and all staying at the same place together. So it doesn’t quite feel like normal life on the race, but it’s also been cool to get to know everyone on the squad a bit better during this month.
Sara:
Our entire squad (55 people) is staying at the same place, Agape in Action, in Quiche. We’re divided by our smaller teams (6-7 people) for ministry, and are working with varying organizations including a local daycare, special needs [children] center, a senior ministry, and the government hospital next door. Ours is the latter. Thursday was our first day at the hospital, and I believe it was a bit overwhelming for many of us. We girls were divided between pediatric and nutritional units.
The shocker for me, as a nurse, was looking at a few of the preemies. There were two in significant respiratory distress. One was really struggling to breathe, the other was very grey and not moving much. Our hostess (midwifery background) came to see us and said they both definitely needed to be intubated, and if something wasn’t done, they probably wouldn’t survive. She asked a respiratory therapist working in the NICU if the unit was full, and the answer was “yes”. So there was nothing more to be done. It seemed such a tragedy, and something I’d never seen before—the lack of medical resources that means life or death.
In the middle of a room full of incubators and preemies, was Anita: a malnourished, blind, nonverbal, nonambulatory 10 year-old girl to which my friend Taylor and I were assigned. She appeared to have been plopped in her wheelchair and placed in front of the TV and was left alone in the midst of the bustle. It took a while for her to warm up, but eventually we found some little games and sounds that made her laugh and giggle, which seemed to light up the room. But her story was a sad one. She’d been abandoned, and has been cared for at the hospital for 3 months, but has no known family. So she’ll likely go to one of the very depressing, dimly lit “homes” for special needs children where she’ll have minimal human contact. Hopefully her physical needs will be met, but almost certainly nothing else. We learned this from our hostess, and it was heartbreaking. Friday, my simple goal for the day was to make Anita feel completely loved and cared for. I sat with her all day, playing peekaboo, rubbing her back, repositioning her frequently, and even working in some pulmonary toilet (she has pneumonia) while she slept. It was so sad, yet so rewarding to contribute to her life in a small way.
