Junior goes to Guatemala for unique volunteer opportunity

Junior Nina Harris looked around, intrigued by the rainy agricultural town of San Lucas Tolimán, Guatemala, where she was staying last summer. The town was still recovering from a civil war nearly 20 years ago, and poverty existed around almost every corner: About 80 percent of the town’s children were malnourished.

Nina and her sister Sonia Harris accompanied their father, the chair of pediatrics at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, to Guatemala to observe a program that Stanford professor of child health and health research Dr. Paul Wise created. The program, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford, builds hospitals and provides better medical care to Guatemalans.

Harris observed the everyday life of the locals, learning how they cope without access to clean water, food or money to fund the city’s needs, such as running electricity, flushing toilets and proper education for children. After staying there for a week with her father, she traveled back home, only to realize that seven days was not enough.

Every year, Wise brings a group of Stanford students and volunteer doctors to Guatemala to provide medical care to the poor.

The group includes one full-time doctor and several promotores, Guatemalans with only a fourth or fifth grade education who are chosen based on their communication skills, how well they work with people and their level of education. After basic medical training, these promotores eventually become surrogate medical professionals, doctors that help with childbirth, for local communities.

“[The promotores] are the eyes and ears for the one physician working in the area,” Nina said. “Their primary focus began around child health and combating malnutrition, and has now expanded to treat children with acute and chronic illnesses.”

Although she went to Guatemala just to accompany her father, Nina worked in the mobile pharmacy and helped with pediatric clinical care. After the trip, she knew she wanted to get more involved in Dr. Wise’s program.

“I want to do something that matters,” Nina said. “I want to take what I have learned in my Spanish, English and AP [Environmental Science] classes to do something in the real world.”

Nina will return to San Lucas Tolimán this July to help develop the town. Her father will once again accompany her on the trip, and the Stanford team will be there for the last two weeks of her stay. In total, Nina will be in Guatemala for about two months. She plans to help the promotores in their medical work to combat the disease and malnutrition that is affecting the children of San Lucas Tolimán.

“The promotores weigh children ages zero to three on a regular basis to see how they fall on the nutrition scale,” Nina said. “It’s really devastating how many children in these areas are malnourished, but by bringing the promotores into the communities for the children, they get access to all the possible medical conditions.”

Inspired by her experiences from her trip last year, she also plans to create a photojournalism project, in which she will photograph children and their families and give these photographs to the families at the end of her trip. The photos will also be placed in a medical file by the promotores for future reference.

Although she is not yet sure how, Harris wants to use these photos to raise money to help the native children.

“I want to give them pictures because most of these families have never had a picture taken of them,” Harris said. “Most of these families have never seen a camera.”

In addition, she is planning on teaching English as a second language to local women for a few hours each day.

“The goal is to educate the women of these communities,” Harris said. “I’m not really sure how to teach a language to people who have never really heard English before, and it will be hard for me to communicate with them.”

To prepare for the upcoming summer, Harris will be taking an intensive Spanish language class equivalent to the Spanish 4 and 5 classes at Saratoga that she hopes will help her become more immersed in the culture of the Guatemalan people.

She will also be taking a backstrap weaving class — similar to the one she took last year — for the same purpose. Backstrap weaving has been an important part of Guatemalan culture for centuries, and is used to create clothing and textiles for the home.

In Guatemala, she will be living in a house with 15 other people that are all members of the same family. According to Nina, many members of the extended family live together because they cannot afford houses for each individual family.

“I’m not scared. Many people have asked me why I don’t feel nervous about the trip, but it doesn’t seem that dangerous to me,” Nina said.

Nina said that she plans to continue doing this type of volunteer work in the future, and that this summer will be a way for her to experience firsthand how she can make a difference in the world.

Her dream is to eventually join the Peace Corps, a government-run volunteer organization that provides assistance to countries outside the U.S. and helps promote a better understanding of American culture and the cultures of those the organization helps.

“Everybody wants to make a difference,” Nina said. “I feel like I don't really know who I would be if I wasn't working toward something that could make a difference.”