Medical Care for Rural Guatemalan Families

When Guatemala halted all flights from the United States and Canada, Partner for Surgery had to suspend surgical missions for the foreseeable future. In order to ensure the health and well being of the children and families who were waiting for their surgeries, Partner for Surgery's health promoters and staff have stepped up to make sure the children in the Infant Nutrition Program remain healthy as they wait. More than 150 children are depending on your support. Please continue your donations.

Fast Fact: To date in 2020, two rural medical mission teams have identified 471 patients needing surgery and four surgical teams have carried out 219 procedures. 

Partner for Surgery: What a Difference Four Volunteers Can Make in the Lives of 285 Individuals: At the core of Partner for Surgery's efforts are the rural medical missions and our local Health Promoters. During the last week of January, four medical volunteers -- Dr. Neal Shealy, Dr. Lawrence "Buddy" Coleman, and nurses Sharon Shealy and Dianne Perry -- recommended a record 285 patients for surgery. The Shealys and Dr. Coleman, all from South Carolina, have volunteered with PfS for over 15 years and this year were joined by Ms. Peggy, from Victoria, Canada. 

Your donations are greatly appreciated to help us to continue to support those in Guatemala who depend on us. 

For photos and news, please visit our website www.partnerforsurgery.org, "Like" us on Facebook (facebook.com/partnerforsurgery/) and on Instagram at @pfsguatemala.

Thank you!

In order to identify patients in need or surgical care, Partner for Surgery (PfS) has a network of Health Promoters who are actively engaged in the various rural communities we serve in Guatemala.

Health Promoters help publicize triage and surgical missions. They escort patients to the hospital and stay with them until they are ready to go home.

If problems develop, patients know they can count on Health Promoters for reassurance and assistance.

The example of Marta and Felisa

Like many older women in rural Guatemala, Felisa lives alone. Her husband died 25 years ago and her children have all left the small village where they were raised. Felisa gets along by walking into the mountains every morning, looking for herbs, fruits and vegetables to sell in the local market. 

Six years ago Felisa came to a PfS rural triage mission with an inguinal hernia, the result of her heavy labor. 

Our Health Promoter in that area, Marta, made sure Felisa received an hernia repair with a PfS surgical team. 

One year later, Marta met Felisa in the market and learned she had another hernia. Felisa had another surgical repair. Recently, Marta learned Felisa was in great pain with a prolapsed uterus so she again took charge, and Felisa had her third surgery with a PfS surgical team. 

Felisa is now healthy and has a wonderful smile. Any time a PfS team is in her village she stops by to say hello.

Your donations help us restore dignity and health for people like Felisa. Thank you for your support!

Ana, born with a cleft lip and palate, was 6 months old in May - the fifth child of a day laborer earning two dollars a day to support his entire family. Two older brothers attend school, further stressing the family’s finances. They live outside the village of Chisec in a rented house that does not have electricity or water.

In January Ana was brought to a Partner for Surgery medical mission in Chisec and admitted to our in-home Cleft Infant Nutrition Program. Since then, our health promoter for the area, Julio Sel, has visited monthly to provide Ana formula, monitor her health, and offer education on maintaining good health for the whole family. Fortunately, Ana qualified in July for the first of the two corrective surgeries she will need.

We are confident that Ana will be one of the 1,000 Partner for Surgery patients that we expect to receive a surgical procedure this year from one of the 17 teams we support with patients. Thank you again for your support and I look forward to updating you again on our activities.

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When a child is born in the United States with a cleft lip their lip is almost always repaired before their first birthday. In countries such as Guatemala this is rarely the case. Almost all of our patients are from remote rural areas far from the big city or even a paved road. Finding them and persuading them to leave the security of home is difficult at best. Don Heebner, one of our volunteers and Board member has photographed over one hundred children many of whom are infants. So he was surprised when he saw Susana for the first time. Susana was holding a towel over her face and Don had to check her folder to see why she was a patient in this surgical mission, which was focused on children. When she pulled the towel away it was clear why. How was it possible that she had not been repaired in 18 years?

Susana was born the youngest of three children, and her mother was not very involved with her children. Her father was even less involved. When it looked like Susana’s mother and father would abandon her, Susana’s grandfather and grandmother stepped forward and said they would raise Susana. Susana had a loving home with her grandparents, but when she started school the taunting and bullying began. Susana would come home in tears from school every day until finally in the third grade her grandparents let her drop out of school. She was homebound until her grandparents heard of a Guatemalan charity called Partner for Surgery that matched children with surgical needs with incoming surgical teams from the United States and Canada who volunteered their skills for free, and would repair Susana for free.

When our team saw Susana there was no way we were going to let her go home without our best effort to make her look like the pretty girl she was meant to be. She was presented with a small mirror after surgery which she used to look at herself for ten minutes at a time. We asked if she wanted her towel back, and she said no, “I do not need it any more“.

Cleft lip patients are held overnight and released the next day. When Don heard Susana was ready to go home he grabbed her camera and met her as she walked out of the hospital, and stepped into the sunlight on a bright sunny afternoon and appeared as a normal 18 year old girl for the first time in her life.

Eighteen years is a long time to wait , but thanks to you and to two amazing charities Partner for Surgery, and Smiles for Guatemala, Susana no longer has to wait in her grandparents house.

Besides Susana, Partner for Surgery and our many teams of volunteers have completed 246 surgeries in the first quarter of 2019 and examined 480 patients.

You are making a difference. Rural Guatemalan families are some of the most impoverished in Central America and your help improves more than their health. Children are better able to go to school, adults can work to support their families and contribute to the local economy. The whole community is uplifted.

Thank you. We could not have achieved these results without you.

In Guatemala, the public health system is often unreachable for people who have no financial or transportation means to get to municipal or community health centers. Thus, Partner for Surgery has established a two-pronged approach to best enable access to both health care and preventive health education.

Yearly, we run a series of five missions bringing medical care and preventive health education to the most isolated communities. On each mission, teams of medical professionals and health educators work in clinics to provide medical care and on-site education to patients with surgical needs to receive surgery within the next two months.

In 2018, 2166 individuals received medical care as part of these missions, 887 were scheduled for surgery, and more than 2000 people attended sessions on preventive care.

Breast and Cervical Cancer continue as the first two causes of suffering and loss among poor rural families in Guatemala. PFS worked to reduce morbidity and mortality by ensuring access to comprehensive screening, follow-up, treatment, and education services for vulnerable and medically underserved rural women.

Last October, Frank Peterson, founder of Partner for Surgery, and I, joined a medical mission and visited families whose babies had been in our nutrition and surgical care program. We witnessed once again the amazing dedication of our medical and non-medical volunteers, staff and Health Promoters, who make the best of very challenging circumstances to make sure some of the most vulnerable populations of Guatemala receive medical and surgical care. The deep kindness and compassion that they convey at every moment strengthened our own resolve to continue with our commitment to rural Guatemalans. 

Thank you for your support! We couldn't have done it without you.