Volunteer

Get Involved:

• Volunteer:

We welcome non-medical individual volunteers who can commit to a volunteer placement of at least 6 months. We ask that our volunteers have a functional use of Spanish; there are many Spanish schools in the country where volunteers can study before they start their work with us. Volunteer tasks will vary depending on needs at the time and the volunteer’s experience and background, but we can guarantee that there will be lots of work to do. Some examples of work are: volunteering with our children’s scholarship program, working with our local coordinator and helping with the tutoring classes, working with groups of women in our adult literacy program, helping in the clinic, and coordinating and working with construction and medical teams.

We welcome individual medical volunteers who can commit to at least a two-week volunteer position, however a longer volunteer placement is ideal in order to develop relationships with the community. Having a functional use of the Spanish language is ideal, however there are possibilities for non-spanish speaking medical volunteers. Medical volunteers (depending on their level—nurse/doctor/dentist) will see patients in the clinic (open Monday through Friday), also included would be to help train our local nurse who works in the clinic, and also possibly to teach a specialized class to our group of health promoters.

Also, there sometimes are opportunities for individual volunteers to join a medical team that is already formed. Often medical teams are in search of additional health care providers. If you are interested in joining a medical team, email us at ________ and we will email you when we have a team requesting additional volunteers.

Teams

We welcome both construction and medical teams. We have worked very hard to establish our relationships and position in the towns, and we ask that teams adhere to our volunteer guidelines, and that in preparation for the trip teams read our “Cultural Contrasts” document. We also arrange free days for teams and travel to other parts of Guatemala. We can set up all lodging, food, travel arrangements for teams from the moment they land in Guatemala to the moment they get on the airplane back home. Teams stay either in San Juan or San Pablo, eat at the home of a local woman who cooks us authentic Guatemalan food with plenty of tortillas, and learn about and participate in the Tzu’tujil culture. Cultural activities include, natural dye and weaving demonstrations or classes at a women’s weaving co-op, a hike up the mountain behind the town, tour of the fair trade organic coffee co-op, participation in a Mayan ceremony, and listening to stories from an elder in the community.

Construction teams work on a variety of projects such as construction of our medical and dental clinic in San Juan, repairs and updates on our classroom in San Pablo, and houses for people in the community, who are living in inadequate conditions to meet the health needs of their families. We have a local foreman and other construction workers to work with teams, sharing their skills and teaching us how to build using block and concrete; they are always happy as well to learn construction skills volunteers bring from the States (such as carpentry). However, teams do not have to have people with construction experience.

Medical teams work usually 5 days of clinic. We hold a couple days of clinic in our medical and dental clinic in San Juan, and then we go to San Pablo and the rural areas for the remaining days of clinic. Groups bring their own medicines and medical supplies, as this is the main source of medicine for our clinic. We can give you a list of recommended medicines and supplies based on the illnesses we usually see and based on experiences from previous teams, and will let you know which medicines we are in need of at a specific time. Our groups usually order most of their medicines and supplies from Blessings International based in Oklahoma; they get very low cost medicines from this organization. We will take care of all the arrangements for setting up the days of clinic such as translators, announcements, buildings, paperwork etc. On average we see treat about 100 medical patients and 25-40 dental patients a day. These numbers are based on a team with 3 doctors and 2 dentists, plus nurses, dental assistants, and other non-medical team members. We have a nurse who currently works part time at the clinic to do follow-up treatment for patients, and we make referrals for patients for surgeries and other problems that we cannot treat or need continual care.