Vision Guatemala Health Investigation

Last month Vision Guatemala started a field study in three villages of Lake Atitlàn, with the support of Corrado, an Italian epidemiology statistician who recently joined our staff and will help us investigate the public health system of our working area.

The main goal of the investigation is to detect the prevalence of common deseases in the villages of San Juan, San Marcos and San Pedro La Laguna in order to improve our methods of intervention and ways to help people emerge from difficult situations.

Vision Guatemala is based in one of the poorest areas of the country. Our work focuses foremost on the support and encouragement of women by facilitating their involvement in their economic environment. 

Over the last few years we have realized that the health condition of our women and their familiars is a critical factor for their success in becoming independent entrepreuners.

The main problem of carrying out this research is the absence of centralized, accessible information: this is partly caused by the structure of the Guatemalan health system and partly by the geography of the country (so to speak, the nearest hospital is about 1 hour and a half from the areas included in the research).

With the help of Corrado, we set up a questionnaire and handed it out to medical practicioners who work in different clinics of San Pedro, San Juan and San Marcos. To obviate the difficulty of obtaining quantitative data, we have prepared a questionnaire which, besides recollecting numerical data, contains a set of questions aimed to identify subjective evaluation from doctors about cultural and sociological aspects.

We started today giving the questionnaire to a number of doctors in and around San Juan La Laguna, visiting the 3 aldeas of Palestina, Panyebar  and Pasajquim. 

As the sun was shining, we decided to walk through the beautiful mountains to get to the villages. 

Off the beaten track, but very nice!

We wandered across a deeply green area of milpas (corn fields), trees loaded with fruits and animals.

It seems like people here are not that used to foreigners, but they were smiling and giving us a warm welcome. And the children, which where greeting us in quite good English, seemed happy to practice their knowledge of language!

One doctor of a rural clinic told us that, one of the aspects that made it so difficult for practitioneers to attend people living in these villages was the cultural factor. In fact many people believe in traditional, non-medical healing and do not visit a doctor when they are sick or when they need help, but a curandero, a medicine-man. And many women give birth to their children in their homes with the help of comadronas, midwifes.  

Furthermore, the notion of “health” is something deeply cultural. 

We have learned that, in this area, when a person is sick, the whole family is involved. This means that the family as a whole has to decide what to do. In some areas, the family has a strong hierarchical structure. When it comes to the decision wether to go to the hospital or not, there is a particular decisional power reserved to the mother-in-law. Sadly, in many cases the family decides not to be nursed by a doctor out of economic reasons, causing worsening and sometimes death of the infirm.

These circumstances can be difficult to understand, but on the other hand very fascinating: Depending on the way we conceive our body, our health tells much about our culture and vision of life.

We will go on with our research, recollecting data, talking to medical practitioners, visiting clinics and health centers… Stay tuned to find out about the results!

By Simona