My experience at Winter Language School in Tecpán

“Can you hear that? That’s your baby’s heart beating! Everything sounds good,” Sandy, one of the women’s health nurses here at Wuqu Kawoq, explains in Kaqchikel to a young, soon-to-be mother as she holds the Doppler on the woman’s pregnant belly. Her patient, Sylvia, smiles and nods in…

I hadn’t slept a wink on my midnight flight to Guatemala. By the time the plane began to descend around 5:00 am, I could barely process what was happening or where I was going. I looked out my window at the dark silhouettes of mountains, some topped with…

“Is it usually like this?” “Oh yes. This is a normal day,” Merida explained as we stood pressed up against the wall at Roosevelt Hospital waiting for her patient to have blood work done. Barely six in the morning and a line of patients extended down the hallway….

This question has an infinite number of answers, but I will try to answer what it means for me to do research here between the crisp, high-elevation city of Tecpán and the hot, tropical town of San Antonio, Suchitepequez. I work on a project studying the prevalence and…

“Familiarity is what makes place ‘a’ place.” – Stanley Hauerwas, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness Dear friends, Guatemala has become “a” place for me. In particular, Tecpán and the surrounding areas have become a place, with familiar rhythms where kind older ladies…

I must confess that I have not taken initiative in learning Kaqchikel. I know how to say the important words, like ulef (earth/soil), ixin (corn), tef (cold), and ixo’qi (woman), but have made little progress in actually being able to understand and speak this language. Language learning is…

Can community health workers deliver complex nutrition education, individualized for each family, and have significant positive results on growth and diet?  Our new publication on child malnutrition and community health care workers shows that they can!  Plus, we managed to grab a quick word with Dr. Boris Martinez,…

Guatemalan women are strong. This is clear in her hands which rub the dirt out of clothes on the pila stone, clap balls of corn masa into perfect tortillas, and swiftly crack a chicken’s ribcage to prepare the caldo de gallina. Her strength is much deeper than her…

  After my first year of medical school, I decided to spend my summer break volunteering with Wuqu’ Kawoq | Maya Health Alliance and learning Kaqchikel, one of the Mayan languages still spoken today in the Guatemalan Highlands. In medical school, I have classes like Biochemistry, Anatomy and…

A woman glances up from where she has been sleeping, on a blanket on the ground. Her voice is distant as she tells us that, yes, her son was born two nights before, stillborn, already in the ground. A mother’s deft hands untie the assortment of cloths that…

“Son muy enojados.” They’re very angry. It’s a phrase I’ve heard time and time again interviewing indigenous Guatemalan women about their experiences of maternal health care in government clinics and hospitals. It’s meant different things to different women. For Leticia, whose first language is Kaqchikel Mayan, “they’re very…