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A young girl sits off a roadway in Totonicapan in the hills of
Guatemala
where a Vine medical clinic was held Nov. 7, 1997.
Guatemala medical ministry
a journey of faith for
team
from Vine International
By Buzz Trexler
for The (Maryville, TN) Daily Times,
November 1997
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala - At La Finca de Carman refugee camp, a tent village
in the mountains 50 kilometers east of Mazatenango, an infant begins its life. Nearby,
another baby hovers near death due to dehydration.
On the Pacific Coast sits the beach village of Churim, where adults and children alike
live daily with amebic dysentery caused by contaminated water. There are also infectious
disorders such as intestinal worms, the result of people living with farm animals.
About 11,000 feet above sea level, as clouds billow across the volcanic mountain
village of Parraxquim, a 22-year-old man named Diago lies paralyzed in an adobe hut. At
19, the Quiche Indian was excavating sand to sell when his back was broken in a cave-in.
Guatemalan doctors implanted a rod in his back that is now protruding through his skin.
"They had to do something to stabilize where it was broken," said Dr. Lytle
Brown IV. "Under those conditions, it's amazing he's lived this long."
Brown, a general surgeon with Premier Surgical Associates in Knoxville, was part of a
nine-member medical team that traveled to Guatemala Oct. 31 for an 11-day mission on
behalf of Vine International, a medical mission ministry headquartered in Knoxville. The
team conducted six clinics in eight days, treating around 1,000 people.
The team arrived Oct. 31 at the Wycliffe Bible Mission in Guatemala City where it spent
the night before touring a clinic there on Nov. 1. The next stop was Mazatenango where
medical supplies were unloaded and sorted at the Vine International warehouse, the first
stop for most supplies sent by the ministry.
The Vine …
Woody Woodson and his wife Jenny traveled to Guatemala in 1987 to adopt a child.
Two years later, Woodson sold his manufacturing business and moved the family to the
Central American nation to work in the same children's home that arranged the adoption.
After about three months, Woodson says, "the job began to fall apart," the
family was robbed four times, was constantly sick and there was no support from fellow
Christians.
"You would think that the Christian community would support each other, lift each
other up," he says.
However, Woodson says there was a tremendous amount of competition among the various
missionary groups and he decided to pack up and return to the United States.
"Right before I left was when a couple of independent groups came to see me and
asked if I would do this," Woodson says of the medical missions. "It took about
three years for that to simmer."
Nonetheless, Woodson eventually got the vision of meeting the physical needs of
Guatemalans while introducing them to the Gospel message and in 1993 formed Vine
International, a non-profit Christian relief ministry.
The first mission was to bring a van filled with medical supplies and equipment, the
next was a school bus convoy, and in between were the ocean freight shipment of several
containers and other small shipments.
'God sent us'
Whenever the questions of "why" come, most often the answer is, "We go
to do it unto Jesus. It's that simple."
In 1996, Randy Holt, an account manager with Block Drug Co., and Dr. Bruce Allsop, a
physician with Lifecare Medical Associates in Knoxville, drove an ambulance to
Mazatenango. They were stopped at the Mexico-Guatemala border crossing for a long time and
while there people were constantly coming up and asking what they were doing.
At one point, Allsop says, a man holding a baby came up and in the course of
conversation said the child needed formula, but he couldn't afford it.
Allsop and Holt opened the back of the ambulance and gave him a bottle of formula,
which just happened to be part of the shipment.
"Who's this for?" the man asked.
"It's for you," Allsop said.
"Who's doing this?"
"God sent us to give it to you," Allsop told him.
"I can not afford this," the father said.
"It doesn't cost anything," the doctor assured him.
Jim Myers, an accountant with HG&A Associates who attends Central Baptist Church of
Bearden with Holt, decided to go on Vine's most recent trip to Guatemala after Holt
returned from transporting the ambulance.
"I could really see the difference in him when he came back," Myers recalls,
then laughs. "Think about driving a four-wheel ambulance full of drugs through Mexico
- going south."
As a member of Vine's most recent team, Allsop, who is in family practice in Knoxville,
has now made seven trips to Guatemala. "When you feel led to do something, you better
do it," he said.
Churim Village
The Vine medical team left Mazatenango on Nov. 2 for a two-hour bus ride to Churim on
the Pacific Coast. As with most clinic sites, once off the highway the road became quite
rugged and the going was rough.
Part of the medical team left Mazatenango in an 11-passenger van, while others rode on
a school bus belonging to Iglesia Elohim, a Mazatenango church that supports Vine
International's mission efforts. Also on the bus were about 15 members of the church. A
third vehicle, a small pick-up truck, transported much of the medical supplies needed for
the clinic.
Once at the beach village the clinic was set up in a large pavilion-like adobe
structure with ventilated walls and a thatched roof. There was a check-in table and two
examining stations, each manned by a doctor and translator. There was also a station
manned by a dentist, Dr. Omar Ponce, a member of Iglesia Elohim; a student dentist,
Christian Aguilar; and two assistants.
Doctors started seeing patients at about 9:45 a.m. and continued to 6:30 p.m., with a
short break for lunch. During that time, about 400 were seen, including around 200
children.
It was at Churim that medical team member Holt was deeply affected while holding an
infant. "I thought of my son," he said, explaining that the child suffered from
collapsed lungs when born at Knoxville's St. Mary's Hospital and was transferred to
Children's Hospital.
"The contrast between the haves and have-nots just hit me so deeply," he
said. "I thought of all the technology that was available to my son but was not
available to this little premature baby, nor to the mother who was bleeding
internally."
Mazate prison
It is not uncommon for Guatemalan cities to have two names: a Spanish name, as well as
a Mayan name. The suffix "tenango" carries a meaning similar to
"ville" in English. In the case of Mazatenango, the Mayan name is Mazate, or
deer. But not all people in Mazate are as free as the deer.
The Mazate prison was the site of the Vine medical team's second clinic.
Jim Myers, a Knoxville accountant, was part of the six-member team that held the
clinic, where about 145 people were treated at the prison.
"At the start, it was a little nerve-racking," he said.
"The thing that made me nervous was the guard was always outside the door with his
automatic weapon and we knew he'd shoot us," Myers said. "But you kind of got to
the point where that was just the way everybody lived. That was just the way it was.
"After all, it was a prison."
'Bodegas' and children
While the Mazate prison clinic was under way, the two remaining medical team members,
this reporter and "Bodega" Bruce White of Clinton, worked on organizing the
warehouse. Much of the donated supplies from groups such as Samaritan's Purse and others
are shipped in bulk with little or no sorting.
In between mission trips, the warehouse is under the control of Iglesia Elohim and
serves a number of mission clinics, hospitals and doctors. However, since there is no one
employed at the warehouse there is little or no regular organizational work done.
"People come here to get supplies for all over," White says of the Mazate
warehouse. "There is no medical facility big enough to ship a container to and store
the supplies. So, it's a distribution center."
White is the sole part-time warehouse employee of Vine International, but for the most
part his work takes place at Vine's Singleton Station Road warehouse in Blount County.
That warehouse is the staging area of Vine's medical pipeline from the United States.
It is there that White sorts donated items, loads ocean freight containers, or prepares
bus- or vanloads of supplies to travel overland to Guatemala.
White explains that Vine has a stateside board of directors, but there is also an
advisory board in Guatemala. It is the latter board that has sought to hire "a
gringo" to work the Mazate warehouse full-time. "They believe a gringo will
carry more weight," he says.
Who provides supplies?
Most of Vine's medical supplies are donated by companies. "A lot of time it's
short-dated, which can be a problem," White says, since those items have to be used
quickly. "Transporting short-dated stuff with medical mission teams is fine," he
says. "When you put them on (an ocean-freight) container it could be a problem going
through Customs."
Obtaining supplies in such a fashion has its pitfalls, White says. Catheter tubes,
hoses and related surgical supplies are donated easily, but the real need is for sutures,
dressings, medicines, syringes, needles, alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, scrub and preparation
supplies.
"So we've got to be real careful. It's awful easy to get loaded up with stuff you
don't need a lot of," he explains. "You need it, but not like sutures."
The Mazate warehouse has plenty of room for needed supplies. "For down here, this
is a wonderful warehouse," White says, noting that the 6,000-square-foot facility
costs $475 per month to rent.
The bays were constructed in April 1995 by a mission team of structural engineers and
welders, while Samaritan's Purse provided two warehouse advisers.
"It's better than the one we've got in Knoxville," White says.
La Finca de Carman
Guatemala became engaged in civil war in 1954 when the military led a CIA-backed coup
against the administration of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. The war
"officially" ended April 7, 1995, when an accord was signed protecting the
rights of the 23 different Native American groups in the nation. However, it was not until
December 1996 that a peace accord was signed.
In the more than four decades of conflict, a campaign of terrorism and genocide was
carried out against the Native Americans, mostly Mayans.
According to an American University case study obtained via the Internet, the war took
a turn for the worse in the early 1980s when several hundred Indian villages were
obliterated and their inhabitants were either killed or forced into exile in Mexico. After
the war ended, the villagers began a slow return to Guatemalan refugee camps such as La
Finca de Carman, where the second of six clinics conducted by a recent Vine medical
mission team was held.
Before leaving Mazate, Vine International Director Woody Woodson of Knoxville learned
that one of the two translators from Iglesia Elohim had dropped from the team at the last
minute.
"(Dr.) Noel (Rodriguez) and I prayed and prayed on the way up" that another
translator would emerge, Woodson said.
To reach La Finca de Carman, or "the farm of Carman," the medical team
traveled about two hours before turning onto a road so rugged it took more than an hour to
travel 7 miles.
The diesel Hyundai van bucked and scraped bottom along the narrow road, which was
bordered by 3-foot ruts. Along the way were shanties, cinder-block houses and even a small
A-frame church.
Upon reaching the camp and unloading medical supplies, out of the midst of a Mayan
crowd stepped a scraggly, lanky gringo, wearing a dirty T-shirt, shorts and tennis shoes.
He greeted us in Spanish, then French and finally spit out some English.
"It's been so long since I've spoken English I've forgotten," he said
apologetically.
His name was Alain-Daniel Poulin, a Canadian who came to La Finca de Carman as part of
Projecto Acompanamiento (de Canada). Poulin said he was a Canadian government liaison
aiding in the resettlement of refugees.
About 15 years ago, Woodson said, most of the Mayan Mam refugees fled Huehuetenango,
located north of Xela, and settled in Chiapas, Mexico. They returned to Guatemala after
the truce was signed in 1996.
(According to Amnesty International On-line, some 85 people were executed in the Todos
Santos community of Huehuetenango between July 10-15, 1982.)
A tale of two infants
As the team tried to determine how many people might show up at the clinic, which was
set up outside of a small community building with two rooms, a villager arrived with a
spiral-bound notebook from which the following information was drawn: 329 refugees,
including 60 children ages 5 and under - five of whom are 5 years old, 19 of whom are 4
years old, 10 are 3 years old, 10 are 2 years old, nine are 1 year old; and seven infants.
The lodges within view of the clinic housed about 100 people each and were constructed
of wood with a blue tarpaulin roof. Each family's living area consisted of raised
8-foot-by-8-foot wooden platforms. Inside, young girls could be seen working corn meal
into tortillas; small cooking fires burned inside the dark lodge, adding a pungent smoky
odor.
In one of the lodges, an infant had opened his eyes to the world of La Finca de Carman
just three days prior to the medical team's arrival. Appearing oblivious to the heat, the
17-year-old mother lay nursing the child while laying under blankets.
Drs. Noel Rodriguez and Lytle Brown visited and shared time holding the child. With a
full head of jet-black hair, the infant appeared strong. When asked what name had been
given, the visitors were told it had not yet been decided.
In contrast, among the scores of patients seen by Brown this day is a mother and baby -
a child who looked ashen and lifeless.
It was here that the difficulty in communicating with the Mayan Mams became most
evident.
Brown and his translator, who spoke mostly Spanish, attempted to convey the urgency of
giving fluids to the severely dehydrated baby.
"Tell her that unless she gets fluid in her baby, her baby may die," Brown
said.
The translator did, but the woman just gave a half-smile and nodded as a crowd of
onlookers watched.
"You need to go now," Brown said with more urgency. The translation followed.
Finally, the onlookers, who appeared to know the woman, seemed to understand and began
to join in instructing the woman. She then left the clinic area, only to return alone a
couple of hours later, leaving the team to wonder whatever happened to the child.
What ails them
Among the six clinics, there were some common denominators to health problems.
"We've been seeing an awful lot of scabies, head lice, a lot of bug bites ... that
have gotten infected," Brown said.
Other ailments cited by Brown include hepatitis, impetigo, ear infections, "tons
of worm cases," upper respiratory infections and probable pneumonias.
Allsop said that the influence of Mayan religion encourages people to build adobe huts
with no windows to "keep out evil spirits." The resulting lack of proper
ventilation keeps smoke from interior fires used for heating and cooking from escaping,
causing conjunctivitis and lung infections.
"Just about everything we've seen is preventable by good hygiene and good
sanitation," Brown said.
Another problem is amebic dysentery due to contaminated water supplies caused by the
lack of an "organized way for waste disposal" and the cohabitation of humans and
animals.
Brown said he was struck by the children he saw and "just the horrible way they
live and yet they laugh and play and still carry on."
In the midst of all of it, Brown said, there was a familiarity: "Adults not much
different than you and I - trying to take care of their family, take care of their
kids," he said. "And they're stuck. They are stuck."
Trouble on the Pan Am
The medical team split up for two days, with the doctors and nurses going on to Xela
where they worked a small clinic in town, treating about 50 people, while the "bodega
boys" (warehouse workers) stayed in Mazate.
Once reunited, the next clinic was to be at Chuanoj, a Quiche indian village near the
Pan American Highway. However, while en route to the clinic the team was stopped for
construction work and met by Terri Littrell who was traveling back down from the village.
She yelled from her passing vehicle to turn back to Totonicapan, a nearby town, where she
met with the team.
The villagers had chopped a large tree down across the Pan American Highway and were
refusing to allow anyone to pass, said Littrell, a Lansing, Mich., native and nurse who
has been living in Guatemala for the past four years.
"The people are all up in arms - and armed with machetes - against the government
about something it's done, and we were the last ones they let in," she explained as
her Quiche nursing assistants looked on. "They told us to get out, so we left.
"We told them it was the last time we were coming up because they can't invite us
in and order us out after making all these preparations."
More needs than time ...
Not wanting to waste a day, a clinic was set up in the home of an obliging resident in
the Ocheta area of Totonicapan.
The house had an open-air hallway where "Patricia," one of Littrell's Quiche
nursing assistants, set up a dental station for exams and tooth extraction. In one
bedroom, Jamie Russell and Cherry Kirby, both nurses in Dr. Bruce Allsop's practice, set
up the pharmacy as a chicken sought to join them.
The doctors' stations were set up in the largest room in the house, where several
Quiche assistants also set up a station to take vital signs, listen to the patients'
complaints and assign numbers.
Littrell sent someone to look for "the drummer," a man who would go through
the town beating a drum, the beats of which would tell inhabitants about the clinic -
where it was and what time. However, the drummer could not be found so a visit was made to
the local radio station where a request was made to broadcast the information.
The people came, in large numbers.
The clinic was scheduled to end at 4 p.m., but by about 3 p.m. the team had not seen
half of those who sought care. Jim Myers, "Bodega" Bruce White and Randy Holt
were working "crowd control" and were told to shut the door and tell people no
more could be seen.
Later, Holt came inside, saying, "The people outside are getting mad." The
doctors were concerned, but continued to see those who had already been given a number.
In some cases, those who were turned away resorted to trickery, getting numbers from
those who had already been seen. Occasionally, the scheme worked.
The clinic opened at noon, and by day's end, about 6 p.m., about 150 people had been
treated.
People of the clouds
It was as if God saved the most beautiful journey for last.
For at the end of a road nearly as treacherous as the one taken to La Finca de Carman
days before there was a scene like none other.
The village was called Parraxquim, and at about 11,000 feet above sea level its
inhabitants could be called the "people of the clouds."
As the clinic was set up in a community building across from a church, the whole area -
rich with yellow flowers splattered across fields punctuated by patches of corn - took on
a surreal look as clouds wafted over the village. At times, the entire landscape and its
people were obscured.
While at Parraxquim, the medical team was joined by a group of businessmen that Vine
had taken on a whirlwind tour of mission projects in Guatemala.
Earl Taylor, former co-owner of Knoxville TV Channel 8 and the newly formed Warner
Brothers station WBXX Channel 20, was part of that team.
Taylor said one of the most moving parts of the journey took place at Parraxquim inside
the adobe hut of Diago, the 22-year-old man who had been paralyzed by a cave-in while
excavating sand to sell.
Taylor and others were present when Drs. Bruce Allsop and Lytle Brown treated the
paraplegic. Afterward, Diago's family presented each of those present with an ear of corn.
"Terri (nurse Terri Littrell) told us what a great honor that was," Taylor
said. "She said that corn represented a week's wages.
"The tears just rolled down my face."
The Rev. Frank "Buzz"
Trexler is managing editor at The Daily Times and pastor of Green Meadow
United Methodist Church, wwwthemeadow.org. You can e-mail him at PastorBuzz@nxs.net.
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