El Doctor y La Doctora

July 27, 2010 Tuesday
On the scale of relative awesomeness, Dr. and Dra. Velilla are in the category of “defies description.” They are SO COOL!!!! They were born and educated in Spain, then decided that they wanted to spend the rest of their lives in the field of medical missions. They’ve been to France, Honduras, Rwanda (during the civil war) and finally settled in Guatemala, where they’ve lived for the past seven years. They have five children, a psychologist, criminologist, reporter, medical student, and one more (I forgot what she does, but it’s pretty cool), and they toted the kids with them when they traveled around. They said today that their youngest was something like 4 months old when they visited Guatemala the first time.
I haven’t had too much of an opportunity to talk to Dra. Velilla, but her husband, Luis, is the doctor that I’ve been tailing for the past week and a half, and occasionally we get the chance to talk between patients. As previously stated, he is a gynecologist, which, for a guy, is practically taboo in Latin America. Evidently when they first showed up, he had a lot of trouble getting the lady patients to trust him and unveil their private bits. But it helped that the town we’re in, San Pedro, is situated in an area of relatively open-minded people. Across the lake, it’s a completely different story. There’s also a fair amount of “quacks” that practice medicine on the lake, and evidently they’re real idiots. We had a woman in yesterday who was pregnant, but one of these nincompoops told her that the baby died, so she came to us to have another look. Her baby was fine, alive and bouncing around in her uterus like a jumping bean. Evidently cases like this are far too common.
The maternal mortality rate in Guatemala is the second-highest in Latin America, after Haiti, since many women give birth in the home after days and days of labor with the aid of a midwife, or with one of these quacks on hand. Sarah told me that all of her cousins had been to other doctors, and had had a horrible birth experience, but that my other sister, Manuela, had gone to Dr. Velilla and it had been a much pleasanter experience (as pleasant as it can possibly be to squeeze something that size out of something that size, anyway). At the office in San Juan, they told us that the clinic had dropped the maternal mortality rate to almost zero. That’s hope, right there.
Suffice it to say, Dr. and Dra. Velilla are living the life, one day, I hope to lead. Except for the children. Five is a lot.