By Mary Ann D’Urso
© Vishnu Hoff
Maria Oxom and her husband, Norberto, slowly walked side-by-side about an eighth of a mile on a cleared path leading to their home. Surrounded by sometimes lush and unkempt greenery, leafy cardamom plants with reddish pods and dried stalks of tropical remains, the path tended toward rocky and a bit hilly. The walk was the last leg of a six hour journey that began in San Juan Sacatepequez where Maria had surgery to repair a 10-year-old hernia with which she had been living like an unwelcomed in-law. In some way, with her husband guiding her arm, these final steps home must have felt almost like a waltz.
Within feet of her home in San Pedro Carcha, a mountain village in Guatemala’s Alta Verapaz, a region known for its orchids, Maria could finally put down her discomfort, stroke the face of her grandson, sit on her own bed, hear her barking dogs.
“I am happy and content because I can go home now,” Oxom, 41, said through an interpreter as she approached her home. When asked if she looked forward to sleeping in her own bed, she said, “Yes. I am looking forward to be home again and I feel happy because I feel healthy.”
© Vishnu Hoff
The Oxoms live in a house that is pretty much one room. It holds a bed, picnic table and plastic chairs. The walls and roof were made from wooden planks. Calendars from different years and thin plastic sheets bearing patterns of red Christmas poinsettias, golden bells and red-striped ornaments, served as both wall paper and a way to hinder the elements, protect the dirt floor. Six machetes ranging from the largest to smallest hung on the wall next to the door. Outside, large blue plastic barrels catch run-off water for recycling. The Oxoms subsist by living off of everything they can raise – mostly corn and beans, a few chickens – and make from their property, which has belonged to Norberto’s family for three generations. Any left over coffee or cardamom is sold as a cash crop.
Maria’s general surgery was not insignificant. For years, the hernia pain prevented her from doing what is commonplace for Guatemalan wives: heavy lifting. Though Guatemala has a free national health system open to all residents, the reality is not that free nor easy.
There are several reasons why the Mayans don’t have operations at national hospitals, said Dan Cable, who began living in Guatemala five years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer and is now Director of Rural Operations for Partner For Surgery (PFS), a non-profit that conducts medical missions in Guatemala and partners with visiting surgical teams like ISHI’s. Most doctors at the hospitals speak Spanish, while most Mayans speak only their indigenous languages like Q’eqchi’ or A’chi’. The Mayans don’t have the money to get to the hospitals, often a distance from their homes. National hospitals also require that all patients having surgery donate two litres of blood, whether the operation requires blood or not. Mayans resist giving blood because, he said, no one has explained to them how it works or why they should do it, so the Mayans have an impression that their blood is being stolen or that giving blood will make them sick. They also believe that hospitals are places where people go to die.
© Vishnu Hoff
In many ways, the story of Maria Oxom resembles that of the other 50 plus patients who received surgery, mostly for hernias and gallstones, on ISHI’s maiden mission in Central America. They are stories of different kinds of heroes: people willing to cross educational, poverty and cultural barriers because need outranked fear. They are the stories of grace and gratitude, like the hot chocolate, handmade tortillas and bowls of homemade soup offered in gratitude at the Oxom dining table to strangers, ISHI and PFS representatives who gave them a ride home.
The Oxoms were like most of the patients and their families at the clinic: pretty quiet. Their responses to what was happening and how they were feeling almost seemed scripted, eliciting the same words of appreciation and gratitude. As the week unfolded at the clinic, it became clearer that what could feel to an American like a disconnect is, to a Mayan, a cultural reserve. At least in part, it is based on the days of their repression during the civil war when the Mayans could only trust or talk to their families. They call it confianza. Trust comes closest to its meaning, but it’s more textured. Until the Mayans know someone well, they are not going to open up about anything, particularly with outsiders.
Eventually, the story of the patients was really the story of their culture. The Mayans are a people made of dogged courage whose voices normally go unheard; whose fears, unnoticed; whose needs, unattended.
Perhaps it is enough to know what Norberto said through a Mayan interpreter before the outsiders left, “I’m very happy that we are back home. I’m very happy for the attention the doctors showed me at the health center. I thank God that my wife is okay and I pray that she will recover quickly.”
Mary Ann D’Urso is a freelance writer and teacher who accompanied ISHI volunteers to help document their maiden mission in Guatemala. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Gannett newswires, The Record and The Star-Ledger.