Guatemalan Goat Standoff

Yesterday, Thursday, was moving day again. The new work team from Tennessee arrived, all 42 of them, and Keeci and I moved back to the Mission House with them to begin our last week of work here. We'll build 18 houses in a village. I'm told the village is a little more remote and the work sites are difficult to get at, and it rained all day Thursday. The bad news: Muddy uphill paths to our work sites. The good news: the post holes may be easier to dig.

Since we didn't do much on Thursday other than drive to Guatemala City to pick up the new Tennesseeans (I still don't like driving in G.C.!), I'll share a couple of unrelated stories of recent days.

There was a medical team staying here at the Mission House for the last week, a doctor, a pharmacist, 3 nurses, and a few other helpers. That's why Keeci and I had to move to the other place. On Wednesday, we had some time, so we drove out to the village where they were working and watched them in action. The nurses performed something like medical triage, as patients came through, they decided if the good doctor needed to see them, or the nurses could handle it themselves. That day, they saw 227 patients! And nearly a thousand for the week, in 6 villages.

The doctor's name is Steve Fineburg, he's a gp in Pascagoula, Mississippi. "It's Steve here," he chastised me. "It's Dr. Fineburg in my office, and this isn't it." He said a lot of the women he saw this week complained of headaches and neck aches. "An easy diagnosis," he said, "of carrying too much weight on their heads." It's not uncommon to see women in the village carrying 40 pounds of firewood, corn, fabrics, or something else on their heads. The solution, he tells them, is equally easy: Stop it.

As for kids, the common things are headlice, worms, and assorted skin rashes. Also relatively easy solutions, if they will stick with the medicines dispensed.

The worst case of the day? One man came in with a serious leg infection that had been festering for months. He needed to be hospitalized, and since that wasn't going to happen, they loaded him up with several thousand dollars worth of potent antibiotics, and told him he must follow up with a local doctor.

The other story involves an encounter while shopping for goats on Tuesday. We'd gone up a trail so rugged and steep you just about couldn't make it by 4WD pickup. We were told of a farm where they had milk goats for sale and got there to encounter the wife on the front porch. She dispensed one kid (human) to fetch her husband who was hoeing over the hilltop, and another kid to get the goats that were grazing up another steep slope.

We stood there, waiting and taking in the scene, me and Tico (interpreter for the day) and Keeci and Rosendo (the goat expert). The Guatemalan wife kept glaring at me oddly, and I knew she wanted to say something and it wasn't going to be pleasant. Finally, she could hold it no longer, and she said through Tico, "You Americans, you can come here or go anywhere in the world and do anything you want, and no one cares. We come to your country, and you throw us in jail."

Ouch! What could I say? I wanted to say, "I'm not breaking any laws here," but at her side she had one of those long machete knives for cutting weeds, and I had a pencil, so I held it in. I sort of laughed, stammered, and finally said, "You come to my state, and you can stay at my house." She wasn't laughing, still just glaring, as if to say, "Yeah, that's gonna happen soon." About then, her husband showed up, along with the goats, and the talk turned to nannies and kids (the goat kind). The moment passed, the woman disappeared into the house along with the knife, and I didn't see her again. Whew!