Its been a while since I’ve talked about what I’ve been up to… so I’ll catch you up!
6 weeks of this program involves volunteer work in Xela. The idea is that we use the Spanish skills we developed as well as gain exposure to health systems/services and culture in Guatemala and Central America.
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons I work with the Red Cross from 3-6 PM. The doctor usually comes around 4pm and the amount of time he stays depends on how many patients come. He is usually there for about an hour and a half. Before the doctor comes, I call the patients into the room (there is only one consult room) and take their blood pressure, weigh them and ask their age. I write this information down in a big notebook, or work with a partner that writes the information. It is great practice with my Spanish numbers! During consults, the doctor explains conditions to me and asks me questions about conditions/bones/general anatomy.
Wednesday mornings I work with the Bomberos, or emergency responders/firefighters. Most of the time I spend there is a lot of waiting. But, I talk with the bomberos, work on Spanish homework and watch Spanish TV and movies, so it helps. When we do have emergencies, we get to observe some interesting situations.
Thursday afternoons, Rachel and I teach a combined yoga/dance class that we named Yoganza (a mix between yoga and danza, a Spanish word for dance) through PEILE, an organization that I’ve mentioned before. The class is composed of 10 students ages 6-10. The two 6 years olds are boys and impossible to control, but the older girls enjoy the class… or at least they seem to!
Tuesday and Thursday mornings I am taking Spanish classes to continue learning grammar and working on speaking correctly. Its great to be immersed in our volunteer locations, but the people working there usually don’t correct you when you say something wrong. I work with my teacher in a café.
Friday afternoons I have a group class with Marissa, Harim and Korrin, taught at the school by one of the maestras. Each week, we have a topic to research and then we discuss that topic in class. This helps us to explain complicated ideas and express emotions in Spanish.
Tuesday nights we have documentary movies at 7:45 PM. Because the movies are later at night (to accommodate the different schedules of all 14 of us) we don’t have time for discussion about the movie. I miss this part a lot! So far we have watched movies about health insurance, corporations and migrant farm workers.
Wednesday nights we have conferences and a group dinner at the school. I enjoy these nights because it is one of the few times during the week that all of us are together and get to discuss the experiences we have been having while volunteering. Also, the food is usually full of veggies and delicious (unlike the typical eggs, beans and fried plantains we usually get)! The conferences we have had so far include a discussion with an immigrant, with a migrant farm worker, and with a person who works with an organization that focuses on a number of aspects with immigrations… such as speaking with people and convincing them to not immigrate, helping immigrants with culture shock both when they arrive in the US and when they return to Guatemala, creating movements to retain culture amongst communities, counseling of all types, language lessons, etc. The organization, named DESGUA: Causas Estructurales de la Migracion (www.desgua.org), has offices across America and Guatemala.
Every other weekend, we have day trips to different areas of Guatemala to hike, learn about weaving, volunteer, and just tour Guatemala. Unfortunately, due to the massive amounts of rain and road destruction, we were unable to go on our trips last weekend (we would have had to cross this bridge, and a number of roads destructed by mudslides: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe1kbhVO8a0&feature=player_embedded). These trips have been rescheduled for the upcoming weekend, provided the rain stops, which is no guarantee.
Experiences with the Red Cross:
The clinic has a surgery room, two rooms with hospital beds, an X-Ray machine, laboratory (which I’ve actually never been in), a pharmacy, waiting room, office and one room for consults. I haven’t taken pictures yet, but I will before my 6 weeks are up. My first week, I learned the system of sterilization, how to fold all the laundry, how to make gauze pads, etc. I have not used most of these skills since then, except for the gauze folding (which we do a lot of!).
The doctor at the clinic is an Orthopedic specialist, but he also serves as a general physician. Many of the conditions that we see are typical of those you might see in any US clinic, although a few are very advanced due to people ignoring pain or signs of infection.
1) Like I said, the doctor often explains patient conditions to me and asks me questions about anatomy or organs, etc. One day, there was a patient in the office with prostate complications. The doctor asked me if I could explain what the prostate was and the condition that this man had. In Spanish, I said “Yes, but I don’t know how to explain it in Spanish.” He responded in perfect English “well, we can talk in English if you want, but you aren’t here to learn English, you are here to learn Spanish. I lived in the US for 5 years and learned how to speak English, so you can live here and learn how to speak Spanish.” Needless to say, I was shocked! I had no idea that he could speak English. It is definitely motivation to keep working hard on the language, if nothing else, just to be able to pull that on someone else!
2) There was a guy who had been having breathing/throat problems for 2 years. He said he went to the General Hospital, but they told him nothing was wrong, yet for the past 4 weeks (before coming to the clinic) he wasn’t able to talk. So, we took a look in his throat and it was FULL of infection. No wonder the guy couldn’t breath, eat or talk! Its really interesting to see people that clearly have complications but wait 2 years to take care of them. The doctor I was shadowing sent him to a specialist because he thought it was cancer and needed to be removed, but the guy didn’t want to go because it meant he would have to miss a day of work. It is difficult to think about, but in a way both work and health are a question of life and death for him.
3) A man came in after having gallbladder surgery, and had some pretty gnarly stitches on his stomach. To make it worse, they were extremely infected and oozing blood and puss (this was 15 days after his surgery). Clearly, there was a ton of infection either from the surgery itself or a lack of care for the wound. The doctor cleaned up the stitches, which turned my stomach quite a bit (mostly because I wasn’t expecting such a sight when he lifted his shirt), and then gave him clear instructions about how to clean them, and prescribed him an antibiotic.
4) We have also seen quite a few broken bones in young people. Most of the accidents occur from falling while playing or tripping in the street. It seems to me that many of the mechanisms of injury don’t call for such damaging fractures as I have seen (many of them are displaced). I wonder if this is a result of the lack of calcium in the typical Guatemalan diet, but I don’t know if this is actually true.
5) Unfortunately, the care, surgeries and medications the Red Cross offers are not free. Each consult is 40Q, and I’m not entirely sure what X-rays and medications cost. Many patients have come in with problems that require surgery. The doctor names his price, but most cannot afford it. When surgery is necessary, they must go to the general hospital, where care is free but waits are long and reliability is low. There are a few programs in which people can apply for free medication, but many medications are not included within these programs. I wish we didn’t have to turn people away! But, I also understand that there are financial constraints that keep organizations from being able to provide everything they want.
Experiences with the Bomberos:
As I said, working with the bomberos involves a lot of waiting around, but when there are emergencies we get to go in the ambulance and observe the calls. All of the bomberos are volunteers. There is no other option for ambulance service in Xela. The hospital has ambulances, but they are used to transfer hospital patients to other locations for CT scans, MRIs, etc. because there are not enough resources to house them in the hospital. The bombero ambulance is more like an emptied out microbus. Apparently, they have an equipped ambulance, but none of the volunteer personnel know how to work the equipment, so they don’t use it.
Its not that I wish people are in danger or hurt, but I do like observing the calls and watching the interactions, and at times I find myself wishing a call would come. It’s a little oxymoronic.
1) The first call I experienced involved a pregnant women who was on a chicken bus when she started having labor pains. We went to a random road where the chicken bus was waiting on the side of the road and helped the woman out of the bus and into the ambulance. She was 31 years old and this was her 5th pregnancy. She was also only 5 months in, so it was not a good thing that she was in so much pain. We drove her to the general hospital. During the drive, the bombero asked questions about name, age, # of births, type of pain, etc. He didn’t take any vitals or even do a primary assessment. The other interesting thing is that we did not use the lights or sirens. So, with Xela traffic, it took us a while to get there. Once we finally got to the hospital, we took the woman into the maternity ward. The hospital is extremely different from any hospital I have ever seen. I found it very disorganized and dirty (compared to the hospitals I have seen in the US) and the nurses/doctors there were slow to answer us, even though we had a loud moaning pregnant woman in serious pain. After about 5 minutes of waiting, a nurse finally approached us and asked what we needed…
2) Another call took us to a very unpopulated part of Xela. We spent forever trying to find the house, and I’m pretty sure our response time was about 20 minutes. Again, we didn’t use the lights or sirens. Once we finally found the house, it was surrounded by mud and really difficult to bring the stretcher through the mud and into the tiny house. The emergency involved a guy that had been drinking way too much, and was suffering from cirrhosis. He had bloody spittle and was moaning incomprehensible words. He couldn’t move himself, so we had to lift him onto the stretcher… not exactly a light person. We also took him to the hospital.
3) Another call took us to the soccer field where XelaJu plays. One of the soccer players had been kicked in the face and had a pretty impressive tear in his front lip and I’m pretty sure his nose was broken. There was a ton of blood, but otherwise he was okay (didn’t seem to be showing signs of concussion). We took him to the hospital as well. It was kind of cool to ride in the ambulance with a relatively famous soccer player, although I’m pretty sure he was totally unaware I was there.
4) And then there was the experience with the flood, which you can read below.
Experiences with Yoganza:
We have only been able to teach our class twice because school was cancelled last week due to the rain (and although the class is not taught through the school, we were told children likely wouldn’t come to the class if they didn’t go to school).
We begin the class with an introduction where we sit in a circle and everyone says their name and an interesting fact about themselves (favorite color, food, etc.). After, we do about 20 minutes of basic Yoga, and then transfer into about 20 minutes of ballet. The last 10 minutes we save for snack (we usually bring bananas because we can buy a dozen for 5Q) and drawing time. The first class, we didn’t have drawing time, but we asked at the end what they would like more of in our class, and they said drawing. We were a little confused since drawing has nothing to do with movement, but we included it anyway, saying that they have to draw a picture of a yoga or dance position that we learned that day.
The first class was interesting. The children are older than I’m used to working with, so I had to change my approach. I decided to use more ballet movements and try to actually teach them the basis of ballet (when I was that age, I was totally into it, although I understand that’s a little unusual). I wasn’t sure they really cared. I’m positive the 6 year old boys didn’t, but the next week I was pleasantly surprised that all the girls remembered the positions and some of the movements and were excited to show me. I was proud of them!
So that’s a quick update of what has been going on. We have another three weeks of volunteer work,
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