County native’s medical training takes her to rural, poor Mayan clinic

Liz Martin says three-month experience changed her life
By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
Part two in a two-part series on locals doing humanitarian work in Guatemala
RIO DULCE, Guatemala – In a setting as meager as the Ak’tenamit project site, located in the jungle of eastern Guatemala, a hike and a motorboat ride away from the nearest road, Dartmouth medical student Liz Martin learned that you make do with the resources you have available. That could mean reaching a diagnosis without the benefit of x-rays or cat scans; stitching up a serious wound without anaesthesia; or comforting a teenage girl by candlelight as she prepares to go into labor.
The daughter of John, a realtor at The Martin Company, and Wendy, a schoolteacher at Glen Lake, Liz is best known in northern Michigan for having lit up high school basketball courts in the mid-90’s. But in Guatemala this spring is where she and her boyfriend Dan made a difference that really counts. The two doctoral candidates volunteered at the Ak’tenamit clinic for three months, receiving Q’eqchi’ Mayan Indians, some of whom had walked for days, for medical help that we in the rich, developed world take for granted.

Officially, their role was to support Maria, the director of the clinic who speaks both Spanish and Q’eqchi’, and 10 volunteers. The two Ivy-Leaguers also trekked twice a week to surrounding villages, carrying huge backpacks full of medicine and setting up impromptu clinics by hanging sheets to make walls and sliding benches together. They would often spend a night there, dine with local families in their homes and see as many as 250 patients in a couple days. But the experience was reciprocal, Liz maintains.
“It’s really not that admirable,” she said over the phone after returning to the United States. “I took away so much more from my time there than the people I served in the clinics.
“In fact, we were still in school and didn’t have that much practical experience. The permanent workers there have lots of experience with common infectious diseases (like malaria or Giardia).”
Nevertheless, at least one family will always remember what Liz for them when it mattered most. On a day she will never forget, a 14-year-old pregnant girl named Marta arrived at the clinic with her mother, just hours shy of going into labor. Having a child that young is not all that uncommon in Mayan culture, but her mother had an anxiety disorder and couldn’t be present for the birth. Enter Liz, who had learned just enough Spanish during five weeks at the Probigua language school in touristy Antigua, to comfort Marta, by candlelight, as she lay in wait. “I was up every three hours to check on the poor woman,” Liz remembers. In the morning, she found Marta with her mother and sister in the room, overjoyed and relieved that the pregnancy had gone well.
The healthy baby’s name: Lisa, after the kind, white-skinned foreigner who had comforted Marta through the ordeal.
Years later, Liz says she will be tempted to return to Guatemala and check up on Lisa.
Other experiences at the clinic didn’t always have happy endings, or they were marred by logistical challenges and cultural differences.
“I had to speak to men about their wives’ health problems, even if a woman came in with months of vaginal bleeding,” Liz remembers. “Because only the men spoke Spanish. That’s why we wanted the girls from the rural areas to get better education.”
Another time a man arrived from the plantation after nearly chopping off his ear with a machete.
“This happened on a weekend, and one of the health promoters was running around, yelling ‘Emergencia!’ We walked in, and this guy’s ear was hanging from a thread. The nearest hospital was hours away, so we gave him 23 stitches on the spot.”
Liz added that, had the man traveled to the modern hospital in the Caribbean port of Puerto Barrios, he may have lay there for two days without getting any medicine.
After all, Mayan Indians are all but outcasts on their own land. Though Guatemala’s 22 indigenous tribes represent a majority of the country, it is the land-owning white oligarchy who have the power and the riches. Most of the victims during Guatemala’s brutal 36-year civil war were the Mayan Indians of the western highlands, who suffered one massacre after another at the hands of the U.S.-backed and trained military.
The Q’eqchi’ people are also native to the western highlands, but the armed conflict forced many of them to resettle in other areas of the country, or take refugee status in Mexico or the United States. Thus, the Ak’tenamit project was established 12 years ago near the Rio Dulce to care for a population of 7,000 relocated Q’eqchi’ Indians. In addition to the clinic where Liz and Dan treated people for malaria, births, machete wounds, scabies, lice, cellulitus and ulcers (stuff the Dartmouth students had never seen before), the “Proyecto” has a boarding school for children from surrounding villages, a conservation branch teaching self-empowerment, and its own lancha, or motor boat, that picks up volunteers or transports patients to a hospital.