July 30, 2002
Hola Mi Amigos,
As most of you know I just returned from my trip to Guatemala. It was one of the most incredible, gratifying and memorable experiences of my life, bar none! There were 8 audiologists including myself, 1 optometrist, 1 physician, 2 ear mold technicians from El Salvador, 4 translators, 2 were Spanish – English, 1 was Spanish – Queche, (pronounced “Key Chay” with the emphasis on “key”) and a missionary who’s an incredible linguist who spoke all 3 languages fluently, not to mention German, French and probably a few more. Queche is the language of the indigenous village folk; for those of you who are Trekkies, it sounds a lot like Klingon, more vowels than consonants and lots of staccato guttural sounds! Others who came along to help out included the daughter of one of the audiologists, the son of another, the physician’s wife, the optometrist’s father and several members of the rotary club from Boardman, Ohio that helped sponsor the trip. The $10,000 they raised paid for 100 of the almost 500 hearing aids we brought. The rest of the aids were donated by our patients and by some of the hearing aid manufacturers. The Lion’s Club supplied the glasses. The “Eye Team” as they decided to call themselves fit about 700 pairs of glasses. The audiologists, who then became known as the “A-Team,” ran out of hearing aids by Friday morning and had to turn people away, including many children. That was the most difficult part of the trip, that and trying to explain to parents who traveled great distances, waited and waited in long lines at the hospital, and hoped desperately for some help for their kids that their children were too profoundly deaf to benefit from hearing aids.
The 22 people on the team ranged in age from teens to 70’s and every decade in between. I truly enjoyed each and every one of them. We had a guy who shoveled shit in the bottom of a grain elevator, another who artificially inseminated cows (don’t forget to ask me how they obtained the sperm sample…and did you know that a steer is a castrated bull??), a highly trained lifeguard, an aspiring astronaut, an arcade owner, a retired boat dealer, an Italian restaurant owner, several divorcees, several almost-divorcees, one wannabe divorcee, a few happily marrieds, some singles, a pair of love birds…quite a mix – the common denominator was they were all fun to be with, they all had a great sense of humor, and they all had big hearts and warm souls. They came from Illinois, Wisconsin, Georgia, Minnesota, Ohio and El Salvador. We arrived knowing nothing about each other and left knowing every detail. It was truly amazing! Is this what overnight camp would have been like???…in my next life I want to do overnight camp…
Guatemala is the poorest country I’ve ever visited, especially the town of Chichicastenango where the hospital was located. Chi Chi, as the locals refer to it, was a four- hour bus ride into the mountains from Guatemala City in an old American school bus. The roads were narrow and winding and in horrible disrepair. Did I mention that it takes at least 2 people to drive a bus in Guatemala? The assistant(s) help the driver turn, back up, and wave menacingly at people in other vehicles so they can pass them on the 2-lane “highway.”
We stayed at the mission house in rooms with several bunk beds and only 2 bathrooms for 18 of us. We were told that the water had been tested and was DEFINITELY contaminated – we were warned not to get water in our noses when we showered. The toilets hardly ever flushed, hot water was sparse, and we had to spray the mattresses on the bunk beds to kill the ticks and fleas. Despite that, several people had itchy bites on their legs. The whole place smelled like mold and mildew and everything felt damp after the first day. I bailed out on the 4th night and took a room at the hotel around the corner. Enough is enough! It was a beautiful hotel, thousands of pots with flowers, parrots in the courtyard, a pool with a view of the mountains, a king size bed, fireplace, hairdryer AND plenty of hot water, all for $55.00 a night! You gotta do what you gotta do… The 3 cooks were terrific – the first night they made us a special fiesta dinner – tomales with chicken, cornmeal, olives and raisins served on banana leaves – yum! And they put lime juice and picante sauce in their chicken and rice soup – mucho delicioso! We ate a lot of chicken and rice. One morning they served warm milk with rice and caramel – that was fabuloso!
The hospital was filthy, the water was contaminated, the toilets didn’t flush and there was no toilet paper. Some of the parents let the kids pee in a cup while they were waiting to be seen and leave the cup under a chair – the smell was overpowering at times. We set up 3 areas to do hearing testing, one of which was in a tiny file closet! The lights didn’t work half the time in another of the “test suites” and the noise level was not to be believed - trucks going by that sounded like freight trains, babies crying, fire crackers exploding in the streets. (At first I thought it was gunfire…) Mostly we were testing kids and most of the kids were severely to profoundly hearing impaired so the noise really didn’t interfere with the test results. We rotated between the various stations including triage, wax removal, hearing testing, hearing aid trials, ear molds, hearing aid fitting, and instruciones. Henry Ford would have been impressed!
The kids were incredibly well behaved, sweet, happy, secure and docile. They hardly ever objected to having us look in their ears, take ear impressions or put hearing aids on them and that’s after driving sometimes as much as 12 hours in the back of a pick-up truck to get to the hospital and waiting in line from 6 AM until they could be seen…sometimes 4 or 5 hours after they arrived – just like American children…NOT! The parents were gracious and appreciative of the services offered to their children. One of the mothers said to me something that I thought translated to “you’re beautiful” – which surprised me since I hadn’t showered in 3 days, my hair was disgusting, no make-up, and even 25 years ago “beautiful” was pushing it – then my brain cells started connecting and I realized she was saying “your heart is beautiful”…she was my first patient of the day on Wednesday - a very nice way to start the day! Later that day a little boy wanted to know why my hair was “blond” – I tried to tell him in Spanish that some Americanos have orange hair – he looked confused and I wished I’d had pictures of my red-headed nieces to prove it to him, only to find out later that I said something about Americans having oranges on their heads…I’ll have to work on my Spanish. Another little boy was all excited about my “white” hands that were the same as the white doctor’s coats! (We were all wearing white lab coats)…he should’ve seen me in February!
Something that caught me by surprise was number of people who were trying to scam us to get hearing aids that they didn’t need – they can sell them on the black market for $100 which is 1/5 of their average yearly income, assuming they can find a job – the unemployment rate in Chi Chi is about 50%. We had to guard the hearing aids very carefully. Last year a bus filled with hearing impaired and deaf kids was robbed - all the kids’ hearing aids were stolen so now the kids are not allowed to wear their hearing aids on public buses – a new addition to the instruciones.
The optometrist brought one prosthetic eye with him. He fit it to an 80-year old Queche woman who had lost an eye in an accident many years ago. It fit her perfectly (apparently that’s amazing as they come in many sizes and shapes). She insisted that she was able to see through it as if Dr. Tracy had actually rejuvenated her eye and no matter how he tried to explain to her that she wasn’t seeing through it, she absolutely believed that he gave her, her own eye back! Later that evening she returned with several people from her village and, with the rest of the Eye-Team as witnesses, they made Dr. Tracy a saint! As a poignant aside, the next day a very self-conscious 14-year old girl came in to the clinic who was missing an eye, but he’d given away the only one he had…
Dr. Tracy’s attempts at counseling his patients in Spanish became legendary by the end of the week. At one point he was trying to tell a patient that he had a growth protruding from his eye, but the patient and the entire waiting room understood him to mean that he had a “penis” growing out of his eye. Dr. Tracy became known as a very entertaining guy!
Fitting hearing aids to this population was an incredible experience. Many of the kids had never heard their own voice or their parent’s voices before. One of the little girls lit up like a Christmas tree when we turned the aid on. She made sounds all morning and giggled with such delight – you could hear her from anywhere in the hospital all morning. When I worked at Children’s Hospital I had an experience like that maybe once a month – here it happened 5 or 6 times a day! It reminded me of why I wanted to do this work in the first place.
One of the audiologists fit a patient named Miguel with a hearing aid three years ago when his wife was pregnant. They were so grateful that they named the baby (their 5th) after her and asked her to be the godmother. She flew down for the christening and considers them her adopted family! Miguel is a 5th generation mask maker – he’s already teaching his young sons the trade. We visited his shop one evening and his son, Miguelito, 8 and nephew, Hector, 9 played the marimba for us – they were very talented! (The marimba is a native Guatemalan instrument.) Each of the masks has a special significance – good fortune, good hunting, good fishing… When one of the single audiologists asked which one would find her a good espouso, Miguel’s mother, wife, and sister-in-law offered to perform a Mayan love ritual for anyone who was interested. (I guess they felt that more than a mask was called for.) We returned two nights later to witness the ritual. It lasted almost 3 hours, complete with prayers to St. Thomas, the patron saint of Chi Chi, lots of candles, flower blossoms, offerings to ancestors including bread, Coke–A-Cola (?!) and local rum, a big fire surrounded by sugar that was dyed red for a sweet life, eggs that were rubbed over the participants’ bodies and placed in the fire (if the egg explodes, it’s a good sign; if not, well, you get the picture), and finally love potion that smelled like violets. We were told it was a good thing that the grandmother was performing the ceremony because if it were a real priest, instead of sprinkling love potion, he would spit on you!
The next day after work, we were treated to a demonstration of pole swinging, a game the kids play for fiestas where they climb up a ladder, sit in a rope (sort of like a rope tow at a ski slope) and swing around and around upside down until they reach the ground. This tradition developed from a legend about God punishing lazy boys by turning them into monkeys. The pole swinging is a way of making fun of the boys by swinging like monkeys, or something like that! Actually, it was a lot of fun – I was the only Americano to volunteer! (I don’t mind heights and I love to swing?)
Next they dressed up in fiesta costumes, (some of our group got dressed up too), very elaborate and beautiful, plumes, masks, headpieces, more colorful than you can imagine and they danced and mimed a bullfight, complete with toreador, bull, and conquistadors. The bull won!
Finally, as it was Hector’s 9th birthday, he was blindfolded, spun around 9 times, and given a long wooden bat to try to break the piñata. Unfortunately, he ended up breaking the piñata just as it smacked him right in the face. Poor Hector lay there bleeding from the nose, very shaken up while all the kids scrambled for the candy. It was quite a scene. I, of course, snapped a picture. Hector was fine the next day, the kids all shared the candy with him, and his father said that some kid gets hit in the head with the piñata about every 2 years – no biggie!
One of my favorite sightseeing moments of the trip was a tour of the cemetery in Chi Chi by Frederic, a charismatic Canadian who married an El Salvadoran audiologist and started a hearing aid practice in El Salvador. (They have the cutest little 2 yr. old named Sebastian, but I got the distinct feeling that Frederic would rather be raising him somewhere besides El Salvador – he said it’s very violent, he had to learn to use a gun, almost all his friends have been kidnapped…not a great place to raise a family.) Frederic gave us a running commentary on Mayan history. He explained that the reason the Mayans offered so little resistance to Cortez was that the symbol of the cross was familiar to the Mayans, although it had a different significance – it represented North, South, East and West to them. Also, the Mayans believed that their Messiah would have yellow hair and Cortez was blond. He wore armor that shined in the sunlight and rode a white horse that the Mayans had never seen before so they assumed it was an animal from the gods. All in all, they were convinced that Cortez was their savior, until he raped, pillaged, murdered all their leaders and stole all their gold and by then it was too late to resist…the Catholic Church in Chi Chi was built over a Mayan burial ground. The Mayan priests to this day make daily offerings at the foot of the church, burn incense, and pray to their ancestors.
Getting back into the US of A was a bit of a challenge as my purse was stolen with my passport, driver’s license, and four credit cards, the day before I was scheduled to return home. (I stupidly left it hanging on my chair at a busy restaurant in Antigua…a girl from the Bronx should know better!) Jose, our Guatemalan translator and a terrific kid, went with me to the police station and helped me file a report – they wanted to know my marital status and how tall I was – in centimeters! That took an hour and a half – manual typewriter with four carbon copies and every time the police officer made a mistake he had to erase each of the copies, carefully inserting a paper in between each of the carbon papers…when was the last time you saw carbon paper??? Fortunately, I had a copy of my passport with me and that together with the name of some big head honcho at Continental Airlines who was a friend of a friend of one of the translators and the fact that I was traveling with a group (who still liked me enough at the end of the trip to vouch for me despite the fact that I bailed out and stayed at the hotel the last 3 nights!) is what got me home! It certainly added a bit of intrigue and excitement to our last day in Guatemala! In case you’re wondering why I didn’t call the US Embassy…I DID! But it was Saturday and the embassy was closed and wouldn’t reopen until Wednesday morning because the pope was visiting and the airport and the embassy were closing Monday and Tuesday as a result. I talked with the duty officer but he said that it sounded to him like an inconvenience, not an emergency… so much for paying taxes all these years!
Well, there’s a lot more to tell but I’m sure you must be tired of reading by now, so I’ll end here and hope to see each of you muy pronto so I can share my photos and hear about your summer adventures of 2002!
Much love to all,
Rhonda
