Día Garífuna

November 26th is the annual Día Garífuna in Livingston Guatemala. Apparently, shipwrecked African slave boats brought their ancestors to the island of St Vincent in the Caribbean sea in the 18th century. In 1796 they migrated from St Vincent to the island of Roatán (off the coast of Honduras), then to Eastern Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Most Garífuna now live in Livingston Guatemala and in New York City.

Every November 26th at 5am, the Garífuna in Livingston renact their arrival by boat to the dock in Livingston. They parade up mainstreet singing and dancing "punta" (vigorous booty shaking). Everybody goes to church, then the bars on mainstreat, where there is much merrymaking and Gifiti-drinking. Gifiti is a potion of rum, and various mystery herbs, "one that grows up and one that grows out," according to Pichi, Livingston native and herbal medicine practitioner.

Many Garífuna in Guatemala are trilingual; they speak their own language, Spanish, and English. I had several lovely conversations about the relative merits of Brooklyn vs Livingston.

Nuns by the Seaside

We went to this resort outside of Puerto Barrios for lunch last weekend. I have no idea who frequents the place. Puerto Barrios is hardly a tourist destination, and the resort is too expensive for the locals. Perhaps rich people from Guatemala City trying to escape the rat race.

Anyway, I like these pics I took of a bunch of nuns enjoying their afternoon. A pity that I missed the shot of the four of them snoring away in a row of hammocks. The setting does not seem to fit with chastity, obedience, and poverty...

New Field Coordinator

Nuria (at left) is our new Field Coordinator. She is replacing Dolors (at right), who has been the project coordinator for over a year. Dolors is returning to Barcelona for a rest until she heads out on her next project (she just finished her 7th).

Nuria works as a nurse in the Canary Islands between missions. Some people might consider her brave-- she brought her two young children with her to Guatemala. Adriana (playing in ocean, at left) is six; Carlos just turned one. They are lovely children. All the same, I am relieved that I don't have two toddlers as roommates. MSF pays for a separate apartment for Nuria and her kids, a baby-sitter, and living expenses. Their father is doctor who currently works in Jordan.

Bad Gout

Rescue me!

I am in a terrible mood and it is 100 degrees and 100% humidity and I am sick to death of speaking this foreign language. I feel sick. I had diarrhea, if you must know. I am taking Metronidazole. I think it is messing with my Central Nervous System. Somebody rescue me STAT, por favor.

Despedida Olopa

We celebrated the closing of MSF-España´s Chagas Disease project in Olopa over the weekend. Six people made the five hour trip from Puerto Barrios to Olopa on Friday morning. Another ten people drove five hours from Guatemala City. A picture of Olopa is at left.

The goodbye party (despedida) started with a five hour ceremony. The guests included: the entire Chagas team, out of town MSF employees, the Mayor of Olopa, the District Health Director, and the composer of the "Chinche Pecuda" offical song (which recounts all three stages of Chagas disease in verse form). [If anybody knows how to upload a music file onto Blogger, please let me know. I will upload the song!]. The ceremony included a lunch of steak, vegetables, avocado, tortillas, and local liquor (a mix of rum, beer, orange juice, and 7-up). The food was grilled outside on a grill stuck into an extra-large sawed-off barrel. After the food was cleared, there were two live bands and of course plenty of dancing.

After the official ceremony, the Olopa team and out-of-town guests went back to casa Olopa, where (almost) everybody danced and drank for four more hours. I reverted to my old-self--I sat in another room and read Manson´s Tropical Diseases. Six hours of dancing is a tad excessive.

All and all, the Chagas disease project tested and treated some of the poorest children in an isolated part of one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere. More than 8,000 quantatative immunoglobulin assays were done in a nearby lab. [It takes several weeks to get results for the same test at a tertiary referral center in NYC.] The good-bye party was an apt end to this impressive project.

Chaos

There was chaos in the Hospital Naciónal on Friday. Other than the MSF clinic, Dr. Ordoñez is usually the only Internist for all the inpatients in the hospital. There is also one Internist for the medicine outpatients, but she has been on strike off and on since July.

According to Henry, the Guatemalan MSF doctor I work with, the hospital has not paid Dr. Ordoñez´s salary for eight months. When I asked him why, he shrugged his shoulders and said that they do not have the money to pay. Late Thursday afternoon, Dr. Ordoñez resigned. By the time I left on Friday, the hospital had not found another doctor to take care of the medicine inpatients. Henry said that there is no other doctor in Puerto Barrios who would take that job.

Becuase Henry and I take care of all the HIV/AIDS outpatients and inpatients, this mess will likely not affect our project. I mention it only as an example of the precarious health care system for the poor here in Guatemala.