Guatemala 2011 Mission Trip
from Stephen Dawson Graham
This morning we woke up bright and early to a great breakfast of pancakes, bacon, papaya and pineapple. Then we headed over to a local children’s hospital to help work with the patients there. We split up into teams by discipline: OT, PT and nursing.

The OT and PT team collaborated to work with a clever 6-year-old boy named Carlos who happens to have CP; he was brought to us from an orphanage to be evaluated for additional needs, and potentially surgery. PT worked with Carlos on postural stabilization and his lower extremity range of motion was assessed to see if he would be a good candidate for tendon lengthening or serial casting. After examining him, we discovered he had good movement in his knee and ankle joints and he does not need surgery! We thought he would do better with orthotics, and may be a surgical candidate when he’s older and his bones and muscles are more mature. OT evaluated Carlos for feeding and oral motor concerns and taught the caregivers at the orphanage how to encourage Carlos to eat on his own and develop his oral motor skills.

The nursing team visited the ICU in the hospital, which has 10 beds. They take care of high-acuity patients with varying illnesses; pneumonia, sepsis and complications related to malnutrition seemed to be the most prevalent diagnoses. The ICU here in Guatemala had a lot of the same treatment modalities we have in the US: ventilators, tracheostomies, gastrostomy tubes, peritoneal dialysis, central lines, arterial lines, etc. The team there wanted input from the nursing team on things they could be doing to improve their patient care. They seem to be doing a lot of things well already, but we suggested some improvements they could make with infection control and basic nursing care like turning patients every two hours and doing frequent mouth care to prevent ventilator associated pneumonia.

In the afternoon, the OT and PT teams travelled to the physical therapy university in Guatemala City to educate the faculty and staff there on cerebral palsy. About 200 people came to listen to the team’s presentation; Nathan, a PT alumni of Belmont, taught everyone about the four different classifications of CP and their associated gait patterns as well as pharmacological and surgical interventions commonly used with children who have CP. The faculty and students were very interested in the material and had lots of questions for the team. We emphasized the importance of educating the community on the necessity of early intervention and prenatal care that can be done to prevent CP. Meanwhile, the nursing team visited the surgery center to meet the medical director and do some preliminary brainstorming on how to help the patients’ care run more smoothly…tomorrow, we’ll be doing a mock run-through of a real surgery from admission to discharge, so check back to see how that went!

Later, all the teams met up at a local soup kitchen called The Lord’s Kitchen to serve a tasty dinner to people in need of a hot meal. We enjoyed ministering to the people however we could, from serving food to cleaning to passing toys and bubbles out to the children there. After the soup kitchen, we headed to the Shalom Foundation offices to celebrate our Shalom host Kevin’s birthday. In honor of this very special day, the team prepared an original song celebrating the awesomeness of Kevin and ordered some tender, juicy and crunchy Pollo Campero along with some amazing chocolate coffee cake. We’re currently in the van headed back to the Nazarene Center to rest up for another big day tomorrow!