Medical Mission to Guatemala

I left my family (husband and two children ages 13 and 6) for eight days. I thought this was going to be the hardest eight days of my life. I traveled with 7 other nurses and 2 surgeons to Guatemala to do a medical mission with Healing the Children. I have to admit it was the BEST experience of my life.
We arrived to Guatemala City on Saturday afternoon. Sunday was filled with clinic appointments with the doctors and the nurses setting up the operating rooms. On that Sunday 36 children were seen. Some were sent away because they really didn't need surgery. Others were scheduled for surgery sometime during the week. There were still a few others we couldn't help at this time.

The first challenge we met was working with the nurses at the Foundacian Hospital who only spoke spanish. It was frustrating and challenging. We all learned with some patience, good sign language and an english/spanish dictionary, we could explain alot. We operated on 9 patients the first day.

The second day I came with signs. I looked up phrases we had needed the day before and translated them on the computer. I hung them all around the operating room to make communication easier. The smiles on the Guatemalan nurses faces said it all. This day 3 cases cancelled. Back in Philadelphia, we would be shouting with joy when a case cancelled...this week we were more and more disappointed that there weren't more surgeries to perform. Day 2 we did 6 surgeries.

The week progressed and we got more and more comfortable communicating with our new friends. We also learned alot about one another. This turned out to be a wonderful team building experience for the 10 of us that went.

At the end of the week we had performed 25 surgeries, helped one child get seen by the oncology hospital in Guatemala and schedule a return trip in 6 months to help fix a colostomy for an imperforate anus. These children were so cute and so thankful. It was really an eye opening experience. We even had one lovely girl take a bus for 6 hours to have her branchial duct cyst removed only to find out we couldn't perform the operation because it had just been biopsied 4 weeks ago, and it was best to wait 6 weeks. She smiled, thanked us and went on her way to ride the bus 6 hours back home.

I think that anyone that can volunteer time to help people in need will learn empathy, compassion, patience, teamwork and love. Perform a random act of kindness and pass it on.