HTI Group - ABC Clinics and Clinic in Chuchuca

This past week we had a group of physician, dentist, nurse, and non-medical volunteers join us to assist with clinics of the ABC children and normal community clinics.  We did not get many photos, but you can also visit Sheri's website for other photos - http://sheriinguate.blogspot.com/  .

 

On Saturday around 18 people consisting of US volunteers and Guatemala staff headed up to the villages of Chuchuca and Xejox to host the clinics and to spend the night.  We had a great 2 clinics, got to spend more time in fellowship with the brothers and sisters of the area, and enjoyed the excitement of the kids in those 2 communities. 

 

One of our goals this year is to reduce the amount of children who fail their grade and we are off to a good start!  Last year we had over 50 children fail their grade and this year we think we may have less than 15 and maybe less than 10!  In Chuchuca, which is one of the more remote villages we had no one fail!  Not sure about Xejox yet, but will know soon enough.  We also had 100% pass in the community of La Palma and only 2 not pass in the community of Paxot 2.  In Paxot 2, at mid year we had almost 6 failing so we consider that a win!

Here are some pics of the clinic in Chuchuca.

Sandra and Micaela and ABC student Marta helping with suction

 Pedro P helping with suction as well.  Pedro is one of the first in middle school and continues to do well with a greater than 85% average.

 

 This is the younger Pedro, in 6th grade and normally a A student.

 We put the miniseries Bible on the wall with a projector and explained it was in English and they would not understand what was being said but they were still glued to the show and telling us about the stories.

 

This area has been affected by quite a bit of rain so we are glad we did not make the trek 2 weeks ago or we would have had a bunch of mud!  One time  more than a year ago our team got stuck about 4 times on the way up to the villages.

 Beautiful views

 

More mud, but almost dry, thank the Lord.

Dental Program

This last year we were blessed by the addition of our newest dentist, Dr. Sandra Aldana and her assistant Maria Chan to our previously two-man team of Dr. Marcos Lux and Martina Sente.  With this expansion we have been able to take monthly mobile dental teams to almost all of our communities.  Not only that, we have had the blessing to add mobile equipment to do fillings as well. 


Dr. Marcos Lux and Martina Sente in Chimente

Dra. Sandra Aldana and Maria Chan in Mactzul V

This is a great benefit for the rural population who prefer to pull a tooth rather than pay a third of a day's wage just to get to our central clinic and still have to pay for the filling.  The numbers of patients requesting fillings has really increased since we started.

Cesar Quino our ABC Coordinator holding a mirror up for Jose to see where he missed in brushing.

 Now our goal is to use our great dental team and their top-notch assistants to get all of our ABC kids evaluated on dental hygeine/brushing technique.  They are able to examine and give an objective score on the percentage of surfaces not adequately brushed. 

Tomas Sente one of the volunteers in Mactzul I teaching a family about dental hygiene.

 

Nicolas also showing the kids and moms how to properly brush.

 

This is crucial data as it allow us to triage our kids and prioritize those with good scores for restorative care, and continue encouaging those with bad scores to improve.  We have seen so many kids over the years, that after a couple of years after a filling already have new cavities (sometimes severe) in the same tooth.

Deisy brushing mom's teeth

We have talked over and over with kids and moms and dads and churches as a whole about the need for good dental hygeine and now we are putting our money where our mouth is! 



Mom brushing Elias' teeth in Mactzul II

Since January, with the help of visiting dentists and teams, we have gone out to the communities and seen 80% of the 356  kids  in the program, spending time with each individual family to show them what bad oral hygiene and good brushing look like. The parents also have to particate in the food dye activity if they still had teeth. Then everyone practices brushing their own teeth and each others'. 



Nelson brushing Mom's teeth in Mactzul II

I want to thank Kemmel for his tireless focus on the kids' dental hygiene.   He has a vision for them and their families to have good dental health and to be able to teach their own kids the same one day.   I know he feels like a broken record sometimes, but we are starting to see progress!  And thanks to our dental team of Dr. Marcos Lux, Martina Sente, Dra. Sandra Aldana and Maria Chan and all the volunteers who have helped this year--you guys are making a difference.



On Mission With Harding University

 

Our week has been shared with a great team from the Harding Univeristy PA school, Pharmacy School and some pre-med students. They jumped right in from the start as we tackled our well-child check-ups for the ABC kiddos. We were also pretty ambitious this year and tried spreading out the team over several more communities, and for the most part it worked great! We covered 14 different clinics in 4 days! The students have been doing vital signs, nutrition assessment, physical exams and basic labs and pharmacy. They also took on the very important task of one-on-one hand washing and teeth brushing demonstrations with their patients. We had some very long days, but thanks to this team and their supervising providers, Gary Hill, P.A., Eric Dahl, M.D. and Dannie Middleton, M.D., we covered 8 of our 11 ABC communities and more than 250 kids! Great job! In addition to working with our wonderful staff and visiting team, we were joined by Dra. Josefina Lux, donating her time as well this week. She is a blessing to this ministry still and loved by her patients.

 

Dr. Middleton with Jaime

 

Say "Ahhhh"

Gary Hill with Lauren and Joe translating.

Drew getting vitals on Erica

Hyejin and Alyssa selling drugs!

Me and Josefina in Xepocol

Women's Health

One of our clinical focuses in our ministry is Women's Health.  In Guatemala, the overall health of women can be negatively affected by numerous factors: chronic malnutrition, illiteracy, young age of first sexual activity, high childbirth rates, high maternal mortality rates and high cervical cancer rates. Here is a list of services that Health Talents offers.  Currently our staff serves in over 30 communities through local churches, in addition to our central base clinics, Clinica Caris and Clinica Ezell. Our hope is to continue expanding in the future.  If you would like to contribute to this work, just click on DONATE and it will take you to the Health Talents International donations form.  Thank you!

Medical consults  (Mobile community clinics, Clinica Caris, Clinica Ezell)
General medicine
Pap smears and GYN consults
Prenatal care

Dental Services (Mobile community clinics, Clinica Caris, Clinica Ezell)
General consults
Teeth cleaning
Fillings
Dental prosthetics

Bible Seminars for Women

Community Education Program
Bible study classes
Menopause
Mental/Emotional Health
Nutrition
Diabetes
Sex Education/Abuse Prevention
Prenatal education (Nutrition, Warning signs/Emergency planning, Breast Feeding)
Family Planning
Dental Hygeine

Gynecological surgery at Clinica Ezell
Fully equipped surgical facility and volunteer GYN specialists from the U.S.

Mactzul V - Mobile Dental Clinic

Yesterday we had our first mobile dental clinic in Mactzul V with a full size dental chair (bigger than our patients) and dental lamp!  We started doing restorative care in some of our mobile dental clinics about 2 months ago and our biggest challenge is getting everything there in one piece without breaking things like dental compressors, dental units and such.  For those who have been down these roads you will understand the force of bouncing that reeks havoc on these pieces of equipment. 

We have had 2 different opportunities to either have chairs/equipment donated or purchased at a great reduced rate.  As a result, we have selected some key locations to try and put in some more permanent dental clinic items such as chairs to better the service to the churches, communities and patients that we serve.   We hope to place 3 more chairs in places like Paxot II, Chuchipaca and maybe Chimente, Totonicapan.  The first of these is Mactzul V as the church has donated us a room to place the chair and in the future hope to donate the room for solely clinic purposes and are even looking at leaving a church member on site as a live in guard.  Not only for us, but for their needs as well. 

So after suffering through breaking one compressor (which Marcos has diligently found a way to fix although we still need to find a part) and having multiple troubles with a dental unit, we decided to create some moving crates made out of 2 by 4's for both the compressor and the unit - thanks to Josue and Manuel our promoters/carpenters for getting these made!  No pictures for now, but will post later.

We were also able to have a dental lamp base with wheels made here locally with a metal worker so now we have mobile lighting as well which provides better light for doing the restorative care mobily.

Fishing tackle box also donated by Casa del Rey - found a great use for it.

We have to send a big thanks to the mission at Casa Del Rey here in Chichi for the donation of this dental chair, plus another yet to be placed.  Thanks Matt and Martitza!

The above picture is of Juan Marroquin and his son.  His son had surgery at Ezell a year ago and we hope to attend a thanksgiving service with their family in September celebrating the good health of their son.

One of the patients who had to pass through dental.  :(  We were afraid people in the communities would not be much interested in paying extra to save teeth, but we have been pleasantly surprised and are grateful to the dentists that work on educating their patients to take advantage of teeth cleanings and restorations - Thank you Marcos and Sandra!

Fluoride Program

This week we may have finally made some headway on a program that we have been interested in for quite awhile. For those who have been here, you have probably noticed the poor condition of peoples teeth and in particular those of the children between the ages of 5 and 18. We have seen many of these young people loose quite a few permanent teeth and it always seems to be the 2 front teeth. So we have been discussing with various dentists the benefits of a fluoride program. When we first looked into this it seemed the cost could be high and it could be a difficult process.



We have been reviewing this for last couple of months with the dentist that works with us, Marcos Lux, and he was involved in this type of program during his internship with the university and the government health system. They focused these programs in certain schools and have continued to see improvements in the children. Thus, we finally found a good time and a location to purchase the fluoride. It turns out that the cost will be extremely inexpensive, about $50 for a bottle of 1000 fluoride tablets. Then we only need 3 tablets for about 60 children. The kicker is the children must swish the treatment every week.



Since the cost is extremely low, we decided to run the idea by some churches and so far the interest has been tremendous. We have been trying to educate the churches and people in our clinics to focus on better oral hygiene and one of our promoters, Gaspar, has done some classes in his church and has also started to do these classes in some of our ABC Program (child sponsorship program) communities.



This provided us a great time to discuss a program with some of the churches and they are very interested in taking on this project themselves. So this last week we met with 2 communities who were going to start today - Mactzul 6 and Xepocol. We tallied the cost and it will be under $2 per month for most of the churches (many will be under $1) to be able to start using fluoride for each of the children in the church between the ages of 6 and 19. Each church will pay for a month worth of the pills and we will supply the fluoride once a month during our clinic visits. In turn, they will administrate the program with the children in the churches and keep a running log of the children that are participating in the program. Their goal is to reach 100% of the children in the church and not just the ABC sponsored children and the cost will be bore solely by the church. We also have some other churches discussing the program as well and we feel that we will have buy in by most of the churches.



The beauty of the program is it is inexpensive and relatively easy to administrate as no application is necessary as the child must swish the solution in their mouth for at least 5 minutes. I tried it and it is a little taxing, but there is not much flavor so not too bad.



Our goal is to reach all of the churches where we have the clinic ministry and then to reach all of the other churches in the area. Then, we have also spoken with the churches that our combined goal could be to eventually reach the school of the community. Lofty goals, but we think achievable as do the churches we have discussed this with.



Please pray for continued positive reception and that it can work out to be a long lasting program administered and promoted by the local churches.