For more than 30 years, Stanford School of Medicine Professor Paul Wise has traveled regularly to rural Guatemala to provide health care for people who desperately need it. He brings with him Stanford medical students and undergraduates interested in helping the residents of San Lucas Tolimán.

Stanford News Service writer Adam Gorlick is in San Lucas with the Stanford team. He will post periodic updates on the program, the people of San Lucas and the experiences of the students who have shifted abruptly from Palo Alto to a small town in southwestern Guatemala.

June 29, 2010

Remnants of lives washed away

SAN LUCAS TOLIMÁN, Guatamala – The rains let up Tuesday morning here in San Lucas Tolimán. Long enough at least for a tour of the damage all the water has done.
Ten houses at the bottom of a hillside were washed away in the downpours that hit this area about four weeks ago. All that's left are the reminders that lives were lived here: pieces of metal roofs and cinderblock walls, food wrappers, pieces of a baby swing.
One husband and father who didn't trust the banks packed his family's savings into the walls of his home. When the flood came, he had only enough time to get his wife and children to safety. Their savings were washed away, now buried in thick mud.
Some lost even more. Ten people in San Lucas died in the flooding.
There's no chance the houses will be rebuilt anytime soon, but there are glimmers that things will return. Saplings have been planted among the debris of the washed-away homes, in the hope that their roots will strengthen the soil.

June 28, 2010

A rain-soaked welcome to Guatemala

SAN LUCAS TOLIMÁN, Guatamala – Driving the road from Guatemala City to San Lucas Tolimán takes nerve. Heavy rains washed away portions of the paved two-way lane a few weeks ago. The debris from mudslides has created a tougher obstacle course for drivers already forced to weave around potholes, caution signs and the occasional dog or pedestrian that gets in the way on the curvy path leading up, up and up to Guatemala's western highlands.

Once there, the rains start again. Drizzling at first, then cascading over the metal roofs of San Lucas' buildings in a quick thunderstorm. The two volcanoes overlooking this city are cloaked in fog, and low clouds hang over the soaked coffee plantations and the yawning Lake Atitlán. Word has it that water levels are rising too high and too fast, and some people are evacuating their homes. The weather forecast calls for steady rains over the next two days.

It's been a wet and road-weary welcome for the Stanford students who arrived last  weekend to provide health care and study the medical services available to residents of this poverty-stricken city and its surrounding villages.

Under the guidance of Stanford pediatrics Professor Paul Wise, the group of medical students, as well as undergraduates chosen by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, are seeing firsthand what it takes to provide medical care to the rural poor in a developing country wracked by decades of civil war, political corruption and the violence of a growing drug trade.

FSI intern and biology major Anand Habib, left, with two local health care workers.
For Wise, the trip to San Lucas is an extension of the work he's been doing in Guatemala for more than 30 years. And it's the basis of Children in Crisis, a program he started this past year to marry Stanford's medical research with the university's expertise in international studies to provide health care to the world's most vulnerable patients: children living in politically unstable nations.

Starting on Tuesday, Wise and the students will head out to some of the 15 rural communities surrounding San Lucas. They stocked up for the trip with medicine – much of it donated by American doctors – at the town's hospital, supported by the San Lucas Mission, a Roman Catholic parish.

The maladies they'll be treating are some of the most common – colds, stomach viruses, diarrhea, asthma, malnutrition and skin conditions. In developed countries, those problems can be easily fixed or avoided with regular medical care or a quick trip to a doctor.

But around San Lucas and much of Guatemala, medical services and health care providers are sparse. The Stanford group is teaming up with some of the local promotores, the 30 volunteers from the neighboring villages who encourage people to seek medical care and help them get the medical attention they need.

The students plan to blog every day – as Internet connections allow – on their experiences, impressions and challenges of working in the area during the next two weeks. Their posts can be found at the San Lucas Toliman, Guatemala, Research Field Trip Blog.