Home Visits with Viejitos en el Campo

At one point in time there was a fairly long narrative to go along with these pictures.  But somehow it went off to the etherworld cemetery.  But very briefly, these photos are of a very long and exhausting day in the campo with Preceptor Sandy Maya and UTMB PA Student Chelsea.  We spend the day visiting these rural patients who are not able to visit medical facilities for routine care.  It was quite an adventure, walking through corn fields and down and back up the sides of gorges to see families whose needs were truly profound.

Perhaps the most significant event of the day was to treat old Don Sebastian, who had an abcess in the stump of his amputated leg.  It’s almost certainly the case that he would have died if we had not shown up to lance and distribute antibiotics to Tat P’ox, as don Sebastian would be said in the K’iche Maya language that he and his old wife spoke.

Sebastian and his old wife are as poor as poor can get.  Their daughter, who lives with them, makes Q150 cleaning house for some proverbial Senora.  That’s a little less than $20.  They must receive charitable handouts from their neighbors or other benefactors, because even if they owned any land – which they don’t – there’s no way the could manage a subsistence living.  But as is almost always the case with Guatemalans, they seem to take their poverty in stride – being friendly and welcoming to their most humble of abodes.