Friends and family,

In May 2026 I will be heading to rural Guatemala for a third trip with Team Broken Earth.  Our team plans on building on our work from 2024 and 2025.

We will see roughly four hundred patients over 4-5 days in rural clinics (which are run in convents, gymnasiums or outpatient departments of hospitals).  All of the patients are Indigenous women, men and children who have little access to health care.  We will offer them primary care and education, direct them to urgent treatment in national hospitals or triage them for surgery with a TBE team that comes to Antigua in the fall. 

Surgeries our team may perform include cleft palate and dental procedures, hernias, prolapse and hysterectomy, and surgery for chronic orthopedic problems.  Costs of surgery/transportation are covered by the organization and these patients have few other options given their remote location and minimal access to surgical care.  Medications and treatments to temporize until surgery will be paid for and brought down by our team.  This includes vitamins and iron, feeding support, hormone therapy, antibiotics and so on.

In addition to seeing patients, our team does home visits to support the cleft palate feeding program and also visits local schools to offer young girls and women education on menstrual hygiene.  We meet with local nurses and doctors and provide support to their practices- last year I was lucky enough to participate in contraception clinics and also cervical cancer screening programs during our visit.  Life in rural Guatemala is certainly different from the life and health care we appreciate here. 

Our experiences in 2024 and 2025 were tiring but amazing.  We have to travel for many hours on bumpy roads to get to our clinics, and power failures are a daily occurance.  We will often see people who have advanced conditions, for whom surgery or intervention is not possible- the medicine we practice is unlike anything I understood before going to Guatemala.  Our team works incredibly hard to provide care and I am deeply proud of what we have accomplished.  Our 2026 team is composed of four doctors, eight nurses, and two pharmacy/logistics members who keep us on track.

I am sweetly asking you to consider making a donation to our team:)  We use the donations to purchase medications and supplies, menstural kits and cups, bottles and formula for the cleft palate program and also tools we can bring and leave with patients and clinics like breast pumps, Ob kits, suture supplies, and so on and so on. 

Thank you so much for considering this.  We appreciate it! 

Rebecca