Two Days in Chicua III

So I’m in a room at my usual little hideout, The Spring Hotel, in something-less-than-sublime Guatemala City.  Nice here, and there’s hardly any guests so far, so it’s extraordinarily quiet.  Of course it has been the case any number of times in the past that a whole crowd of missionaries arrive from the airport or a fieldtrip to ignite a buzz of checking-in and getting-settled activity.  But I don’t think that’s the case.  So I’m hoping that I’ll get a good 6 hours of sleep before the phone rings and I hustle through a shower to get downstairs for my 5:45 taxi to the airport for my return to New York.

Meanwhile, I’m still in the glow of what was an extremely good first four days of a 3 week medical experience for Carly and Caitlin, the two PA students working with Dr. Patricia Crane.  As noted in the last post, the first day in Canton Xepocol was a busy one.  As for the second and third days, in Canton Chicua III, in term of numbers of patients it was slightly slower, but all the docs reported being confronted with what seemed like more serious illnesses.  The same went for the fourth day, in Canton Pocohill II.

Enthusiastic students that they are, their new experiences sent both of the students running off to the internet cafe each evening to research the infirmities they had run across during the day.  And whether confirming a diagnosis, verifying a treatment they had prescribed, or asking what resources might be available through local or national channels, their daily experiences made for extremely interesting dinner chatter – complete with smartphone pictures to demonstrate what they had seen.

I enjoyed seeing the photos and hearing the commentary, because my own schedule of meeting and paying bills and finalizing arrangements for this rotation as well as the upcoming March rotation, did not allow me to hang around and watch the ladies do medicine all day. But I was able to get out to Canton Chicua for an hour or so just to check out the new digs – a “Centro de Convergencia,” or building built for community health get-togethers of various kinds by the National Ministry of Public Health.  And of course while I was there, I snapped away with the camera at this community which, to the best of my recollection, I haven’t visited for about 8 years.

(continued after photo gallery)

It was a very interesting little visit.  The building itself was nice enough for a 3/5 completed building.  The lack of floors in much of the building did not distract from its serviceability, and even seemed rather normal for this backwoods community.  Because Chicua III is like WAY out in the sticks, a few very rough kilometers southeast of the Barranco del Molino – the Ravine of the Mill, a 1500 meter gorge you have to switchback through to come to or leave from the pueblo of Chichicastenango.  The isolation here is so extreme that even more than in Xepocol, hardly any of the adults and a lot of the children speak only K’iche’ Maya.

Language barriers were overcome with the expert help of the Guatemalan staff, however, and Dr. Crane and Angela saw a good number of women, while Caitlin and Carly and their translator, Kristina, saw about 30 patients each – including a few that made the dinner chatter especially lively.

I hope to get an update very soon on how things went today, when Caitlin and Carly were supposed to be doing child and family wellness checks for schlarship recipients at the office of the educational foundation with which I work, ACEBAR (for anybody curious about the acronym, that’s Asociación Centromaya para la Educación, el Bienestar, y el Asistencia Rural), while Dr. Crane works at the nearby National Healt0 Ministry’s Centro de Salud.  I do hope they took some pictures to share.   But in the meantime, I’m sharing a dozen or so photos here that I took on Tuesday, February 7.

More to come, one way or another ….
Max Kintner