P11
August 2012
There were times when they almost felt like prisoners.
Other times when they were horrified at the sights of a
cemetery and garbage dump (which sometimes were
one and the same).
And others when they felt frustrated by the level of care
they could provide to some patients.
But, more than anything, GCU nursing students who
took a mission trip to Guatemala this summer said they
felt blessed they were able to help so many people with
little to no access to health care, and thankful for the
opportunity to experience a different culture.
“I got way more out of it than any of the patients we
helped could have possibly,” said
Tina Norton
, one of
three graduate students who made the trip. “They have
such a different way of life; it makes me very appreciative
of what I have living in America.”
Norton’s experience is echoed by dozens of GCU
students every year.This year, more than 100participants
took mission trips to locations such as India, Thailand,
Rwanda, Malawi, China, Costa Rica, Fiji, Peru and Mexico.
GCU students got a wake-up call when they arrived in
Guatemala City. Their living quarters was a three-story
building that was surrounded by barbed wire. The living
conditions were fine – therewas electricity, air mattresses,
even the Internet – but they were not allowed to leave
the compound under any circumstances, and group
trips to outlying villages were taken in vans with tinted
windows so that they didn’t advertise Americans were
on board.
“It has really become a lawless society over there, so
you pretty much hire your own law,” said
Anne Wendt
,
an assistant professor, who coordinated the trip. “The
houses up and down our street had armed guards
because we were in a fairly nice neighborhood. Even the
Sparkletts bottled water truck had armed guards.”
Grad student
Rachel Abney
said the security measures
were a little unnerving, but what was even more startling
was a trip to a cemetery and the dump on the first day.
The cemetery consisted of concrete caskets piled in rows
seven or eight high above the ground.
“And if the family stops paying the rent on the casket,
they’ll chisel out the corpse and throw it in the dump
and then rent it out to the next family,” Wendt said. “That
was a very moving experience for the students. Here
they were standing over this dump, and on the ground
they saw little bone fragments (from a child) and vultures
circling around picking things clean.”
Hundreds of people live at the dump in tents, scavenging
for things they can live on or items they can cash in
for recycling.
“It was really sad,” Abney said. “They would all run after
the dump trucks when they came in because they
wanted to be the first one to go through the stuff that
was being dumped.”
Exposing students to such atrocities on the first day
is common on mission trips. It breaks them down and
opens their eyes, exposing the world of good they can
do – even in a short amount of time.
For GCU’s nurses, the “good” came in the form of day
trips to remote villages in Guatemala with no running
water or electricity.
There they encountered people with parasitic and
fungal infections, birth defects, stomach pains from
contaminated water, and skin abrasions and rashes.
Those were the easy treatments.
They also encountered others: a pregnant woman who
hadn’t felt her baby move in two weeks and probably
already had suffered fetal demise; another woman who
had a blood clot in her leg; and a man who was paralyzed
and had developed bedsores from his wheelchair that
were so bad they went straight to the bone.
“It was pretty frustrating at first trying to figure out what
we can do to help these people,” said Norton, knowing
that treatments used in the U.S. simply aren’t available at
such remote outposts. “There were some people where
we couldn’t do as much as what should have been done,
which is against my upbringing as a nurse. You don’t want
to leave anybody behind like that. But in that situation,
you kind of have to.”
In the end, the number of people they were able to
help, and the gratitude of those people, stayed with
the students.
“These people would offer you the food they were eating
or drinking, and they had nothing for themselves. They
were very gracious,” said grad student
Natalie Kobinski
.
“I would definitely do something like that again.”
