On The Road

Traveling from Guatemala city to Huehuetenango is a five hour journey by a long and windy road (see map at bottom). Suzy Happ, who has the rare combination of simultaneously orchestrating a perfect schedule as well as enjoying the ride, organized the journey with our PCI drivers Rony and Josue, who brought us as smoothly as possible over the road to Huehue and teaching us about Guatemalan life.

Chris, Josue, Bob, Suzy, Melissa, Rony arriving in Huehuetenango

Last night we had the change to meet with some key people involved in Providence's Guatemala Initiative (see link on the upper right area of the page). Mark Koenig has been involved in Latin America for more than 30 years since serving as a missionary in Venezuela. He has worked in the Providence International office for more than 20 years, leading and shepherding the global outreach of Providence's mission office in Renton. He arrived last night with Mark Rosenberg, the director of the internal medicine residency at Providence Portland, and Rachel, a 3rd year resident at Swedish/First Hill in Seattle. Also key in this process is Aimee Khuu, who has been coordinating teams for the Providence Guatemala Initiative for the last months. They had two particular missions apart from ours: 

- to select a site where Providence residents and teams can do clinical rotations in cooperation with Guatemalan physicians and medical students

- to cement a relationship with Rafael Landivar University, creating an opportunity for medical students to do rotations within Providence facilities

Back row: Mark Koenig, Melissa, Bob,  Chris
Front row: Mark Rosenberg, Rachel, Aimee

The four of us met both with the group above, as well with Pascale Wagner, the director of PCI (Project Concern International, see link) in Guatemala. She shared with us some of the specific efforts of PCI in Guatemala, from rural electrification, health education and promotion, disaster prevention, and of course, Casa Materna in Huehue. Pascal is a gracious woman from Haiti who has been involved in Guatemalan relief efforts for at least 10 years. As the discussion progressed it became clear that Huehue would be an ideal site for clinic rotations that would include obstetrical training with medicine.

We arrived at the house of our hosts, Abesaida and Arnoldo, who hosted Suzy 20 years ago when she studied Spanish in Huehuetenango. Seems as though Suzy has a large family in Guatemala as she is welcomed like a returning daughter. More posts about our hosts later, but we are settled in for our Huehue experience. Tomorrow we will visit Casa Materna.