FAQs

Six weeks have flown by! So much has happened and I'm not at all ready to go yet. Jake, Tori and I are taking a bus through the night to Tikal later today and we have until Wednesday to travel a bit more. Since we've got only four days in the states before second year med school classes start again, I won't get to see or talk to many of you as soon as I'd like but I know you'll have questions. So here are my responses to questions I've gotten after past trips to tide you over until we can have a more in depth conversation :)

Best part?
Always the hardest to answer so I've tried to whittle it down to a top 5...
1-Giving Luis a Quiche Bible/our conversations about theology
2-Night spent at Fuentes Georginas
3-Working in clinic (learning from the docs, speaking Spanish with patients, getting to know students from all over)
4-Relaxing at Lake Atitlan and at Champerico
5-Getting to salsa dance with friends every week

Worst part?
The goodbye dinner

Pictures?
I'll upload some when I get home. For now check Tori and Ariana's Facebook pages

Was the food good?
Hit or miss. Some was great, like pepian, jocon, tacos, various soups, pitaya, mango, chocolate from Doña Pancha's. I'm still not sick of rice and beans. I definitely don't want to eat cucumbers for a while...I'm not a huge fan of them to begin with and got served a lot of them the first several weeks. Oh, I also learned I'm allergic to mango skins...I can eat the fruit and LOVE it but can't prepare it myself :(

You've lost weight...Did you get sick?
The weight loss is mostly from walking everywhere and a different diet. But I've had some GI issues, and we'll leave it at that :)

Did it meet your expectations?
I expected to spend more time in clinic and working on patient education than I actually did. I still learned a lot. The weeks were long with work in the morning then afternoon classes but it was even more fun than I could've hoped for. With Luis, I covered more grammar than I thought possible, and our hours of conversation helped reinforce all those lessons and the new vocab I was learning. We also traveled to communities around Xela as tourists more than I thought.
On another note, I knew as a tall blond I'd stick out, but the number of catcalls, stares and inappropriate requests I received here still shocked me.

How does it compare to your last time in Guatemala?
In many ways the two are very different. Last time in 2011 I spent two months working in a rural school and was in charge of short term missions teams coming in. This time we were in a big city; I was only responsible for myself, got to travel a ton and was in class or clinic most of the day. Both taught me a ton about Spanish, what I want to do in the future and myself in general. It was fun coming in knowing someone else in the program this time, and I still got to know a ton of amazing people from around the world.

Would you go back? When?
Lord willing!! Maybe not the exact same way but I'd love to visit Luis' village, keep working on my language skills and serve as a doctor in a setting like this. Yeah there are frustrations, limitations, and barriers, but I love it. Second and third year in med school will keep me pretty close to Loma Linda, but maybe fourth year I can do an away rotation and then depending on my residency I might try to work abroad then. I'm still very unsure what I'd like to specialize in, so that will definitely affect details of such plans.

Would you change anything about it?
Of course there were good and bad moments, but I couldn't have imagined a better way to spend the summer. It was refreshing being reminded why I'm in medicine and investing so much time and money in huge textbooks.


Well, this has helped me process...my top 5 might change after we see Tikal. I've been looking forward to seeing the ruins since we bought plane tickets :) hopefully between this and the previous posts you've been able to keep up with my adventures, but I'd love to talk more if you have questions or want more details!!