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Personal Narrative: My Trip To Guatemala

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From the dazzling sunsets over the indigo Sierra Madre mountains, to the scintillating waves of the vast Lake Atitlan, Guatemala’s natural beauty is clear. But, during my stay in the country, I came to realize that Guatemala’s natives too, radiate a certain beauty, much like the environment surrounding them. This inner beauty revealed itself through a handful of meaningful encounters, turning the 2017 Jesuit Medical Society Mission Trip into an experience I will not soon forget.
My trip consisted of a 4 night stay in the city of Sololá, a capital city lying at the heart of the department of Sololá, Guatemala. A strip branching out from northern tip of Lake Atitlan, Sololá (the department) is home to about 30,000 people, primarily speaking Spanish, …show more content…
After we set up, but before patients started arriving, a few local boys were running around outside the pharmacy. They scurried through a hole in a chain link fence surrounding a nearby basketball court, running, jumping, and chasing each other. I approached the court only to watch as all the boys but one ran off. I too shimmied under the fence, alone on the court except for a lone boy in an orange shirt who had stayed behind. Braver than his friends, he wasn’t scared off by the big American toting a small orange ball, immediately running up to me. He was interested in the ball, trying to get it in the hoop and demonstrating some basic dribbling skills. We shot around for a bit and it was obvious the boy was having a great time. I attempted to speak to him in my broken Spanish, gathering that his name was Ricardo and he lived in a tin-roof hut right next to where we set up the clinic. We played for a while, but eventually patients showed up that I had to tend to. However, throughout the day when I found a second of free time, Ricardo seemed to pop up out of nowhere with the little orange ball ready to play more. We played catch, did volleyball passes while I tried to learn about his life in the isolated village. He told me that his mom was in line to be seen by the dentist, before saying that he loved sports. His energy was extremely contagious as I too felt as active as a 9-year-old boy, despite my lingering fatigue from the trip’s string of late nights and early mornings. At one point, I gave him a small bottle of bubbles, and watched the amazement on his face as I filled the air with small shiny orbs of soap. He has never played with bottled bubbles before and was eager to try to blow his own. Before long, I was called back to my duties with one of the doctors, and wasn’t able to return to Ricardo for about half an hour. When I did

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