Two separate teams of health science students are in Guatemala over Spring Break this year.  One team consists of nursing and pharmacy students.  The other includes OT and PT students.  Both  team are writing about their experiences.

Team Nursing/Pharmacy
from Rachel Searfoss, Tim Zerwic & Ellie Ivancich

Put a few students in a room and you come up with a physical assessment. Put a few more students in a room and you come up with a list of suggested medications. Put yet another student in the room and you learn what exercises can be done to remedy specific pain. Put all of the above along with faculty and interpreters in a room, and you come up with a plan, from English to Spanish, for how to help an individual return to a more optimal state of health.

Day two of health screenings and teaching begins in Antigua with the College of Health Sciences and Pharmacy missions team. The group has worked incredibly hard to find better ways to organize our efforts together in order to provide the most useful amount of care that we can give to the coffee plantation workers and their families. Everyone has offered their insight, experience, heartfelt concerns, suggestions, and innovative ideas to make this process mesh together in a solidified way. When workers came to the screenings earlier this morning, we began recording height and weight first, assessing for any complaints of pain or health concerns, taking blood pressure and blood glucose measurements, and teaching for both adult and child CPR education. The effort to reorganize the health screening process engaged the workers and families so much more than before and also helped to streamline the process into where those with more serious health issues were able to receive more concentrated and specific care. One of those cases worked closely with our occupational therapy student on the mission team, Tim.

A man who works the coffee fields was complaining of upper back and shoulder pain. He reported that he lifts heavy bags of coffee over and over again each day. The bags, filled with fresh coffee harvested, can weigh up to 150 pounds. After assessing the injury, Tim considered that the man may be suffering from a supraspinatus tendon impingement. This type of injury affects the rotator cuff and involves abduction of the arm away from the body and can result from overuse and overexertion. Working with an interpreter, Tim taught the man how to perform different types of stretches and exercises he could do at home, even with a can of beans, something he easily has on hand.

When looking at the faces of the workers and their families, our eyes have been greeted on few occasions. A visitor might be curious as to why those we observe are so hesitant to meet our eyes with their own. The way of life on this Antigua coffee plantation is one of extremely hard work. No day goes without sweat. No head is left unmarked from the volcanic ash falling from the leaves of the coffee plants. No moment is wasted in the effort to support a family, pursue a paycheck, and provide a meal. The dedication and work ethic of these workers is unmatched by any we have interacted with in years past. These people realize that if they do not work, they do not eat. Many families greet each morning with the question of whether a meal might be had that day, and as a result, they lift up their worries in prayer, putting full trust in God to provide for their needs.

Despite the toil and unabashed dedication these individuals put in day after day, the joy that they express never seems to wane. The smallest and most concentrated point of human connection, eye contact, is a treasure that brings each person obvious happiness. A smile, saying “Hola,” and asking someone how he or she is doing today, completely brings the Tennessean-Guatemalan interaction to life. Something we may take for granted is so cherished here. The value of human connection has not been overlooked by any person on our team during this visit. From the children in the schoolhouse to the workers in the middle of the coffee fields, we all have reached out, heart in hand, to meet the arms of another.

One of the highlights of our day was spending much more time with the children of the plantation workers. Housing our screenings in part of the school that educates the workers’ children, we had a chance to spend much of the afternoon teaching them how to perform CPR, how to use a stethoscope, and what a human heartbeat really sounds like. Faces of the children lit up with astonishment at listening not only to our heartbeats, but to their own, hearing for the very first time what that beating in their chest really sounds like. It filled our hearts to hear every student enthusiastically counting chest compressions to 30 aloud in Spanish, and then proudly giving our CPR dummies 2 breaths, genuinely beaming with pride at what they were able to learn and accomplish. These might be small tools, but as we have already learned from one plantation worker, this teaching can save lives.

Some time before our team came on this trip, a local worker’s young daughter, only age 4, fell into a small pond filled with water. After tracking down and hastily lifting out the young child, the mother tried to hang on to what small sign of life the girl had left by doing the only things she could think of to do. She rocked the child in her arms, stroking her hair back while she screamed her name aloud. It wrenches the heart to hear a story like this, realizing that the knowledge of CPR may have saved her life.

The greatest gift we can share with those on the coffee plantation, their children, their wives, their families, is knowledge. This knowledge is the essential unseen passage of life from one group of individuals to another, spreading like fire to other members of the family, friends, and from what we have heard already, to other coffee plantations nearby. The mission team here is leaving a footprint far larger than we realize and likely will ever know. With ash in our hair, sweat on our scrubs, and smiles on our faces, we look forward to every interaction that we have, realizing that just like a mustard seed, the seeds will continue to grow and bear fruit long after we have gone.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.” –Matthew 13:31-32 (NIV)

In Him