Kids of Xepocol
In retrospect, one of the ironies of my life is that although as a kid or young adult I never had any desire to work with children, I have spent most of my adult life working with them. And of all the kids I’ve worked with, I think my young friends in Guatemala are, as a group, my favorites. I can rationalize several reasons for that – including a disarming lack of sophistication, a cultural predisposition to stoic good behavior, and the overriding fact of dire poverty that inspires a humanitarian response in me. But there is also quite simply that Guatemalan children are just plain beautiful.
The photos below were taken on February 6, in the community of Xepocol (see the first post from this clinical rotation). As mentioned in that post, Xepocol is a poor community even by rural Guatemalan standards, and if you look closely at these photos you can see some pretty clear signs of malnutrition in two or three of them.
The sad thing is that clinical missions and student rotations like this cannot do much about poverty and resultant dietary deficiencies. On the positive side, however, some of the secondary issues can be addressed by itinerant medical practitioners, and perhaps even more important is that there is inevitably a bit of health education that happens in encounters like this.
So here’s to kids …
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