Project HANDS is a group of people whose goal is to provide healthcare, education and other support to those who, by chance of birth, have lives less fortunate than their own. Their projects are aimed at improving the quality of rural Mayan life by providing healthcare and education.
Healthcare: Because the Maya have little or no access to medical care, the group sends medical teams to run outreach clinics, and surgical teams to perform elective surgery. As an extension to their idea of bringing surgery to the patients, they are working on a long term project to build a small surgical facility or hospitalito in a rural area.
Their trips usually go to rural northern Guatemala, to the departments of Alta Verapaz, Baja Verapaz and Quiche. On these trips they work closely with their affiliate Partner for Surgery (PfS), a US based NGO. PfS does all the local ground logistics for the trips and Project HANDS provides a small group of about 5-6 people to run the clinics. These clinics are set up in outlying rural areas where the focus is to find patients who need surgery. However, they also bring a small pharmacy with them and try to help all patients who come to the clinics. The patients who require surgery are then scheduled to have their procedures done either by the next Project HANDS surgical team or other volunteer surgical teams.
The group’s next trips to Guatemala will be:
- October, 2010 – Triage trip to El Quiche
- November, 2010 – Surgery trip to El Quiche
Education: The majority of Mayan women are homemakers, wives and mothers. However, many have much more to offer their families and communities and wish they could. With the Guatemalan healthcare system desperately sagging and in need of everything from equipment, supplies, medications and professionals (throughout the whole country but especially within the indigenous population), it seems a perfect fit to marry these women with careers in the healthcare sector. When twenty one year old Carmen worked with the group as a Q’eqchi translator in one of their outreach clinics, they saw her potential. Upon asking her if she would like to be a nurse she smiled shyly and said “If only…” implying it was something completely out of her reach. But why should it be? That was enough to start the group thinking, and led to Project HANDS funding young women to continue their education and go on to nursing school.
To find out more about Project HANDS, please visit their website.
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