Thoughts From Dr. Garcia
Our van climbed a road up the mountain for what seemed an endless time on a road full of potholes and rocks. We arrived finally to San Gabriel, a small village in the Highlands of Guatemala. We gathered at the Centro de Salud, a small concrete government owned building which houses healthcare services for this town. The building has not been in use for a long long time we guess judging by the amount of dust and cobwebs. There is a larger room in the front and then two smaller bedroom size rooms in the back which we quickly populate with all our equipment, which includes medications on a table, our “pharmacy“, plastic chairs and tables, a registration desk, and some basic laboratory equipment to measure blood sugars and the like.
The first few patients start coming in. I start by seeing this woman in her late 30s. She’s very thin. She tells me she can’t eat and that she has no energy. As we start talking she tells me that her 13-year-old daughter drowned in the nearby lake Atitlan just a few months ago. Her two daughters, ages 13 and 14, along with two cousins ages 12 and 13 walked down a ravine a long distance to the lake without the parents’ knowledge. One of the girls, a cousin, went swimming in the lake while the others stayed on the shore. The swimmer could not make it back to shore and started making signs of distress so the13-year-old daughter bravely tried to rescue her but was not able to. Then her other 14-year-old daughter got into the lake and was able to save the drowning girl but not her sister. So my patient’s 13-year-old daughter ended up drowning. This is not the only tragedy affecting this family during this year. Her husband previously left her and now she is trying to obtain child support through the legal system. Her 14 year old daughter who survived the ordeal at the lake started acting out and ran away from home with a young boy and was unaccounted for for several months. Her daughter recently returned home but family relations are still difficult.
My patient had tried to cope but has no appetite and feels very weak. I feel disarmed. There is no counselor. I offered her a multivitamin, but we don’t carry any sedatives or anti-depressant in our small pharmacy. There is no long-term follow up.
San Gabriel and the mountains surrounding the town could be easily called paradise. The green mountains are lush, their profiles disappear in the mist and touch the clouds. The woods produce a heavy fragrance and the songs of all sorts of birds surround us.
The town has some signs of prosperity which has brought in by the men and women who work in the USA and send money back. There are some large houses with columns and domes built with this hard earned wealth. Underlying all this beauty though there is the brutal reality of poverty, suffering and loss.
I left the town feeling discouraged, does anybody care? Where are the government resources? These are a beautiful and hard-working people who deserve better.
-Dr. Rodrigo Garcia
