2019
Trip Members: Adriano DellaPolla, Mark Dotseth, Ashlyn Glann, & John Gossen
Our time in Guatemala was spent providing vision screenings and glasses to those in need, alongside learning about the Mayan culture and the people we were serving. The locations for screenings were determined by our host families as we had to fight through the unique local traffic jams on our commute. Demand for glasses was so high we often had to close clinic before being able to see all the patients in line, in order to ensure we would have enough eyeglasses for other communities. More often than not we saw patients long past our cut off deadline. Locations for our makeshift clinics included school nursing offices, residential backyards, and middle of farms. More than once we have had a chicken or turkey walk through our ‘clinic’. We spent most of our time giving out eyeglasses and gave out over 500 pairs over the 4 weeks we were in country.
Two highlights during our glasses screening exemplified the need in the community and gratitude we received. Caring for a 19 year old girl with 20/200 vision in both eyes, as she was essentially blind, but we were able to provide her with glasses correcting for myopia and astigmatism left her seeing 20/20. After struggling to get an 80 year old gentleman’s glasses prescription correct for 20 minutes, we were able to find the perfect ones. He thanked us and after thanking us he turned around and said he is so happy he’ll be able to see his wife’s face, which put a huge smile on our face, as well as hers.
The language barrier at times was tough. Although the Guatemalan official language is Spanish, many of the indigenous people we worked with spoke their native Mayan language only. Within the country, there are 23 Mayan languages spoken which change depending on the region. The people we worked with primarily spoke either Chuj or Q’anjob’al which sounds nothing like Spanish or English Thankfully we had Emilio our translator who was fluent in both dialects, as well as English and Spanish. Overtime, we slowly increased our Spanish and Q’anjob’al. Our coordinator and point of contact, Caxho, taught us about his culture, traditions and shared allegories with us all. We learned about our Mayan calendar signs on the dates in which we were born. Each day we learned more about the Mayan culture when we are not providing glasses.
After finishing vision screening, we often times would spend the rest of the day with our host families and people in the communities we were staying. Our host families were welcoming and warm to us, since arriving in Guatemala. Ashlyn (Ashula) was adopted into our host family and was constantly being dressed in traditional Mayan clothing for the last two day. She also was constantly swarmed by the girls wherever we go. In Huehuetenang, we would played daily soccer matches with the kids in the communities and even played pick-up basketball with the adults at the local elementary school. Mark was renamed El Giante by the kids, as he towers over them during soccer matches. John’s love for spice and heat earned him a new nick name too "El Gringo Loco," for putting Chile powder into any drink or food item he could get his hands on. Also, John was a 10/10 bug magnet -- they constantly avoided the light and flew directly towards him.
The size of the bugs in Guatemala was dwarfed only by the hearts of the people. Our translator Emilio invited us into his home. When not translating, he works as a bread maker alongside his family. We were able to knead, roll and cook some of the bread while there, we had no idea if we were doing it right and we looked ridiculous pretending to be bread makers. But, the hospitality we were fortunate enough to receive was incredible. Napo, the father of our host family, taught us about traditional Mayan hunting practices, showing us how they hunt with opepals, which are essentially blowguns, for small game. We made our own ammunition out of clay. We didn’t catch anything except clumps of mud stuck to our shoes and a few laughs.
Soccer games were played until it was too dark, and the rest of the night was spent playing card games and attempting to show the kids magic tricks. We awoke the last morning hoping to see the sunrise over the mountain, and as expected, it was blocked by the mountains, but the sunlight shining onto the mountain peaks glistened as the air was full of chickens crowing.
GUATEMALA
INDIA
SE Asia
Trip Members: Tollison Fowler, Ali Mause, Matthew Taira, Allison Tigner
Pine Ridge Reservation (Spring Break 2019)
Trip Members: Matt Taira, Supreet Bains, Megan Berg, Arianna Dalamaggas, Paul DiGiovanni, Megan Gillepsie, Andrew Lane, Kevin Lang, Andrew Lee, Nikki Pataroque, Rachel Pham, Grace Pratt, Sam Stoupa
Trip Members: Gavin Brion, Charles D'Alessandro, Shravya Dindu, Nathan Ostlie, Breanne Parets
All of the kids were so excited to see us. At one of the camps they taught us how to play cricket. Despite my lack of ability to speak their language, we were able to bond over the awesome game that is India’s national pastime. Plus, I got to ride an elephant. Which was pretty cool to say the least!
-Nathan Ostlie
Project CURA was both humbling and motivating more than anything else. Working with the Indian people showed me how although I had completed an entire year of medical school, I still had a lot to learn before I could make a significant impact on someone else’s life using my medical training. I was humbled in this sense, but this humility was not experienced without motivation as well. While working with pediatric residents in India, I came to see how individuals with just a few more years of training and experience could provide such a greater degree of care to their patients, and I became excited and inspired to get to that point in my own life. Project CURA taught me that while I may not have the skills to fully treat someone just yet, I am getting closer and learning more each day, and I would not trade that invaluable lesson for the world.
-Charles D’Alessandro
Trip Members: Lily Foley, Margarita Loxas, Ralph Mendez, & Lindsay Taylor
PERU
During our time in Peru, we stayed with a host family in the small mountainous town of Quillabamba. The host family owned an international coffee company that processed local coffee beans from the surrounding mountains. As part of our medical service, we traveled by van to villages deep into the surrounding mountains where access to healthcare was scarce. In fact, these villages were so remote that they mostly subsisted on potatoes that they could grow in their backyards and chickens they could breed. Once we got to the villages, we set up our make-shift clinic usually at the local school or community center testing their vision, fitting them with the appropriate lens prescription, and checking their blood pressure. Villagers would flock from all sides of the town, putting their job or daily plans on hold in order to come see us and receive care. After around 4 hours of clinic, we would pack up and begin the descent down the mountain back to our host family’s house. During one trip, the van was flagged down by a villager on the road asking us to examine her eyes as she was busy picking coffee and missed our open clinic hours. All four of us were sweaty and exhausted from the long days work but proceeded to get out of the van, grab our supplies from the trunk, and test this women’s vision in the middle of the jungle. This experience was a major eye-opener to how extreme seclusion can have a major impact on how an individual views their health and that a little compassion and understanding can go a long way with interactions like these.
Trip Members (L): Adrian Alonso, Mary Conklin, Nicholas Edwards, Sandra Elmasry, Lizzie Mause, & Matthew Watz
(R): Kara Arnold, Nitin Kanneganti, Nick Kuttner, Erika Sasaki, & Koree Willer
Trip Members: Tollison Fowler, Ali Mause, Matthew Taira, & Allison Tigner
One moment from our trip to Vietnam that really stood out to me was volunteering at Maison Chance in Ho Chi Minh City. Maison Chance is an organization that serves orphans, street children, disadvantaged people, and the physically handicapped in Vietnam. At Maison Chance they have a grade school where we spent most of our time volunteering. We did swimming lessons every morning for the pre-K and kindergarteners. In the afternoons we performed visions screenings, and ended up doing over 100 visions screenings for the children who attended Maison Chance. We also put together classroom activities to spend more time with the kids—making paper airplanes, dancing, playing games, and doing sports. Throughout our experience at Maison Chance, we had the opportunity to work with an incredibly helpful and humble translator named Tuan. Tuan, who is wheelchair bound, worked and lived at Maison Chance. He acted as a translator for all of our daily activities. Without him, we would not have been able to complete the service work that we did. He was essential to our success. One of our last nights in Ho Chi Minh City, we took Tuan out for dinner with another Maison Chance volunteer, Nelli, who was from Germany. Nelli told us that recently Tuan had been feeling a bit down due to changes in his personal life. She remarked that this week working with us she saw a huge change in Tuan—that he was more himself, more outgoing, and seemed a lot happier. She noted that it seemed we had brought him great joy in working with us at Maison Chance.
I reflected on this conversation after our trip was over. I realized that it exemplified what it can mean to do “service”. We traveled all the way to Vietnam, we did vision screenings, gave out glasses, donated art supplies, played with the kids, and hoped to make an impact on those who we served. However, we also made an impact on those who served us. That week in Ho Chi Minh City, Tuan worked to serve us and his help was essential. In our gratitude to him, he found a purpose for that week, and that allowed him at least for that week to be a little more joyful. I am grateful to Tuan for his dedication to helping us that week. I found great joy in working with him and in getting to know him, his love of Maison Chance, and his desire to serve others. I found that sharing in joy and serving one another was remarkably impactful to my experience in Vietnam.
In our trip to Uganda my group travelled to Kabale and had the chance to observe patients in four different hospital setting and in countless different departments. We got to learn about the health care system and what they think is the best way to practice medicine according to their culture. One of the main things that shocked us as a group was male circumcisions. While this procedure was necessary for the country to reduce the risk for HIV and HPV transmission it was very shocking to us to the see that the patients were 14yrs and up. We thought it was barbaric. How could they wait so long? How can the patient be awake throughout the whole procedure? How can they endure all the pain? But when we talked to the doctors, we realized that this was a way to respect the beliefs of all the tribes surrounding the community and by waiting you are actually giving the freedom to the man to choose whether or not to do it. The health center director there in Uganda also discussed some of the disbeliefs that women had concerning male circumcision-- this implicated that in many cases, the partner of the patient also had to be educated and to some extent had a say in the decision. It was a culture shock for sure, but we learned to acknowledge different cultural practices and developed our skills in cultural sensitivity. We tried really hard to learn after this experience not to judge but to understand some of the practices that did not fill our norms and what that meant to the patient and the physician. I think this is a quality that all six of us in my groups will be able to use for the rest of our life.
UGANDA
