Panabaj Clinic

This week we facilitated a clinic in Panabaj with a visiting medical group from the U.S. Samuel , on the left – a recent Mayan Families employee and Oto on the right, he has been with Mayan Families for nearly 6 months now – helped set up the clinic and do whatever was necessary. They are photographed coming back from the clinic, stopping at the look out to see the view of a rare moment of dry weather over the lake. They are on the Santiago side of the lake.

We were so happy that there were two dentists attending the people in Panabaj. Dentists are very rare to come with the medical groups and they are needed desperately and we usually have way more patients than they can see. But this time we were very surprised to learn that the people in Panabaj have a real fear of going to the dentist. The doctors tried to convince people with really bad teeth to see the dentists but they refused. Instead of the usually 25-50 people a dentist could attend, they only saw 8!

People braved the mud and the rain to line up and wait to be attended by the doctors. Several of the women who helped translate Tzuthuil to Spanish were mothers of sponsored children in our school program. This was their way of giving back to the program.