HEARTBREAK PART I

Have you ever experience a loss of someone you really cared and felt like you would die? Your heart beats fast and hard and felt throughout the body. I have felt quite often this way in Petén, Guatemala. I am surrounded by economic and spiritual poverty. The economic poverty is so evident families live less than $3/day. Children are sold as human mules for drug trafficking, harvest for organ transplants and sex slaves to foreigners. Thirteen year old girls are forced to marry older men for a monthly meal price for their families. Teen pregnancy for wed and unwed girls is rampant. Petén has the second highest teen pregnancy rate in Guatemala. People live in partially built homes with concrete, stones, branches with roofs made from aluminum sheets, tarps, wood, and palm leaves.  Plumbing is a big issue and electricity is a privilege. If you are sick then access to healthcare is a privilege for those with money. People die because they can’t afford antibiotics. No hospice for the dying. People die and are buried within 24 hours. Within 10 days of being here I felt helpless and incompetent as a nurse. An infant was born by C-section in respiratory distress. The pediatrician

calls me into the operating room and for what? To relieve the anesthesiologist as I became the breath of life to the baby while she tried to find an IV access and pediatrician provided chest compressions. There were no vents available in the mission hospital. The baby was transported to the national hospital to prevent a lawsuit. Everyone knew the baby was going to die. For two hours I used a CPR bag to assist the baby during the transport and at the national hospital. Two weeks after I learned that the national hospital pediatricians placed an umbilical line and heroically worked on the baby because they knew I was hurting. I had never prayed so hard in my life expecting a miracle to happen. I know how Jesus felt like Matthew states “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like a sheep without a shepherd.”