The “Proyecto Doctoritas Wellesley Crew”— Emma, Patty, Ildy, and Katie— left the States today for their fun-filled summer in El Triunfo, Guatemala. This marks the beginning of my third year of commitment to the villagers, to whom I owe the majority of my compassion and my passion for public health-medicine.
I can’t believe that it’s been two years since I made my life-changing journey to El Triunfo— all alone, armed (helplessly) with my Spanish dictionary and a pocket knife (& my fake “wedding ring” to shoo away men), but also with my enthusiasm and naivety.
I often use this sentence to summarize my experience: My “research subjects” in the El Triunfo became my friends and teachers as I immersed myself in their lives and as their streets infested with poverty became my very own. Moved by the beautiful words of Paulo Freire and Paul Farmer I’d read in the corner of our humble one-room house that my host family of four and I had shared— I made a foolish promise to everyone that I’d be back soon, really soon.
Exactly a year after that, I returned to El Triunfo with a group of seven Wellesley students to launch Proyecto Doctoritas (www.proyectodoctoritas.weebly.com). We grew together as we somewhat haphazardly put together a health promotion program by training our doctoritas and providing them with full scholarships to middle school.
So, it’s been a year since we launched Proyecto Doctoritas, a three-year-long pilot program, designed to promote empowerment, dignity, and solidarity. Now, four members of the Wellesley Crew, which has grown to be an organization on campus with ~12 committed students, are back in El Triunfo to assess the outcomes and to improve the program.
It feels weird not to be back with them this summer. Don’t get me wrong. I am extremely proud of the Wellesley Crew for carrying on the momentum from last summer and running the program. Yes, in that sense, the project has indeed become sustainable. But, it feels weird not being there with them, physically, in El Triunfo to see our doctoritas and to eat my black bean stew with some fresh tortillas.
I can’t wait to be back… in about two months!
Until then, I will study hard and work on creating a protocol for assessing our program intervention outcomes (oh, thanks to my solid epidemiology background, which is about to be tested in two days! *sarcasm*). Okay, venting done. Back to studying.
Proyecto Doctoritas as featured in Nuestro Diario, a Guatemalan newspaper (August, 2010)
