Melanie Gray Miller Reflection – Global Health in Guatemala

Melanie Gray Miller was awarded a Center for Global Health Student & Trainee Travel Grant in the fall of 2023 to pursue a project at Hospitalito Atitlan in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala. View more photos of her project in this Flickr photo gallery.

Thanks to the MUSC Center for Global Health I was able to have a phenomenal global health experience in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala! I was lucky enough to have a connection with Hospitalito Atitlan in Santiago Atitlan, a small village on Lago Atitlan, a volcanic lake in the highlands of Guatemala, and I knew I wanted to return there for my Global Health International Elective to work at Hospitalito. What I did not expect was exactly how unforgettable the trip would be.

On our first day at Hospitalito, we learned about the history of the facility. Hospitalito was initially opened in 2005 in an enormous community-based effort to bring medical services to the indigenous Mayan population living in the villages surrounding Lago Atitlan. It brought not only primary care services, but also access to surgical and specialist care. Unfortunately, shortly after opening its doors in 2005, a catastrophic mudslide destroyed the original Hospitalito, resulting in its closing. Thanks to truly amazing community partnerships and fundraising, Hospitalito was able to reopen less than 2 years later in 2007 and has been thriving ever since. I felt that the history of the hospital was so crucial in understanding the resilience of the Mayan people and their clear ability to serve their community in the face of disaster. How special is that!?

The other pediatric resident I traveled with, Sarah Olson, and I worked as medical volunteers at Hospitalito, providing pediatric primary care to children enrolled in the Maternal Infant Health Program, which aims to improve health outcomes for children under 5 who are born to indigenous Mayan mothers with limited resources. In our time at Hospitalito, we saw all 75 children enrolled in this program, in addition to many other children who live in the surrounding communities. Many of the children were seen for well child checks, however, just like checkups in the U.S., many patients and families had additional questions, concerns, or other minor problems, many of which we were able to address. The most common ailments we saw in clinic were very similar to what we see at home: allergies, constipation, common colds and upper respiratory infections.

I think one huge misconception in global health is that volunteers from high-income countries bring knowledge and resources in a unidirectional way to low- and middle-income countries. This could not be further from the truth for my experience in Guatemala. While we were able to teach mothers in the Maternal Infant Health Program about newborn care and normal and abnormal findings on exam, they were already experts in breastfeeding and lactation and how to raise happy, healthy children in their culture. I felt like I learned just as much from them as they may have from us. I was also super impressed by the pediatric resident working at Hospitalito, his knowledge base and ability to practice independently in a limited-resource setting. Additionally, Hospitalito partners with “comadronas” or midwives in the area, to make home births—a practice very engrained in the culture—safer, in efforts to reduce infant and maternal mortality.

Overall, my trip really reinforced the idea that in global health, it is so important to remember that medical practices in other countries and cultures are not better or worse, sometimes they are simply different—and learning about these differences can be really beautiful.