Do You Wonder?

It is one month until the Children of the Americas medical team volunteers drive to their respective airports in the early morning hours and board their flights for Guatemala. The weeks before departure will be spent planning, packing and preparing for one of the most intense seven days any of us will experience for the rest of the year following a COTA team. In-between the "three P's" we will celebrate  school festivals, American holidays and all of the transitions that come with the end of one season and the beginning of a new year.
Those of us, and there are many, who have one foot in each country find ourselves already mentally in Guatemala, but we realize that many of our donors have never traveled to the Central American country that we work in. They may wonder about some of the things that make COTA special. 
If we had a wish list of things our board would like our supporters to know, it would look something like this:
We have amazing surgeons and OR support staff. Truly. 

Our surgeons, operating room nurses, anesthesiologists and techs come from all over the United States. They are highly trained, skilled and compassionate medical professionals who give no less to our Guatemalan patients than they do to their American patients. And they do so at their own expense for no financial compensation while still meeting the needs of their practices in the states.  
Our pharmacy is fully stocked and funded by a specific anonymous donor and by COTA funds. No patient in Guatemala pays for medicine, because doing so would mean that they would go without. From antibiotics to vitamins, each prescription is prepared and every patient is individually educated in their own language. Doing this for over five thousand prescriptions in one week is logistically challenging and takes a dedicated team of translators and four pharmacists.

Children of the Americas medical supplies are carefully selected, donated and purchased so that each of our patients has what they need. These medications are already packaged and have been shipped to Guatemala. Packing all of the above came together in a big way, cheerfully and carefully, one a rainy day in September that would have dampened the spirits of a less resilient group.
Our volunteers are amazing. No question about it. Some are retired, most still work at their respective professions, and a few are in school; but for one week in Guatemala we are a unit of over 100 people who come together for a common cause. 

 Children of the Americas supporters are working miracles with their donations. 
Our donors are loyal, compassionate and altruistic. Most of them will never see the women and children that they will benefit in rural Guatemala. Our supporters trust us to use their donated dollars wisely, for the purpose that they are intended, and we do. We do so faithfully, thoroughly and professionally. 
Now that you no longer wonder how and what we do, supporting us financially is an easier decision to make, and so simply done by clicking here:

 GoodGiving Challenge Fundraiser for COTA 

Making the world a healthier place is a great way to celebrate the holidays. 

 

The Number Five

 Five dollars doesn't buy much. If you remember a time when it did, you are showing your age. Fifty dollars will get a steak dinner for two, with wine, or a night out at the movies with pizza. Five hundred dollars finishes up most people's Christmas list, with a little to spare. Five thousand dollars? It is hard to imagine what our readers could do with that amount of green paper rectangles. With five thousand dollars, you are halfway to a new car, or better yet, departing for a cruise. 
At Children of the Americas, we look at money a little differently. We view financial donations through the eyes of our Guatemalan patients and the possibilities that exist for them if we have available funding. Patients like Angel, who came to the states through Children of the Americas and left healthier and happier than he had been in years. 

This is what Angel's dental x-rays looked like when we first encountered him as a patient in our dental clinic. The victim of a robbery in Central America, Angel had been shot in the face and the bullet penetrated his lower jaw, exiting via his cheek. Without funds for medical care, Angel suffered for years, and was only able to find a Guatemalan dentist who agreed to wire his teeth into his jaw. For two years Angel subsisted on liquids and hope that access to surgery to rebuild his jaw would somehow become available. By the time he found his way to a Children of the Americas team in Guatemala, Angel's teeth were floating in his gums, held in place by wires that were embedded in his mouth.

Getting this fourteen year old to KY for donated surgery, finding him a foster home (thank you Teresa and Ed Tackett!) and arranging donated OR time, oral surgery and dental bridges took funds we had to raise, hope we had to muster and bravery on the part of a homesick but determined teenager. The team of professionals who donated their time and compassion to restore Angel to health didn't think about financial compensation. Angel's Mayan mother in Guatemala had no money to thank us, but she used her gift of textile weaving to send us some hand woven "thank you cards."

With five thousand dollars, we could fund the travel costs of twenty more children like Angel; children from Guatemala who have no hope of finding surgical intervention in their own country and who have COTA professionals waiting here to help. 
We are halfway there. 
Giving the gift of health this holiday season has never been easier. The GoodGiving campaign runs for a few more weeks. Clicking on the link below allows you to be part of a future miracle. 

COTA Fundraiser

Why We Do What We Do

 Special thanks are in order to COTA volunteer Nate Whipple from Colorado. Nate is an active and enthusiastic member of our fundraising committee. Those of you who do not know Nate can be reassured that if Nate puts his trust in an organization, you can also. By creating the power point above, he was able to explain what we do and why we do it. The timing for explaining Children of the Americas to prospective donors is perfect. Our annual fundraiser continues until the end of December.

Donations made during this important period will be used for our upcoming medical/surgical/dental team in Salama, Guatemala. This child was helped by COTA because donors understood that a life lived with chronic health issues is a life lived with missing potential. Our donation portal can be found here: GoodGiving Challenge. After watching the powerpoint, and visiting our donation portal, if you still need some inspiration, you will want to remember that Guatemala has the highest rate of pediatric malnutrition in all of Central America.

 Children of the Americas Power Point

 

The vitamins and formula we donate on our medial team are life-saving. The infant on the left did not survive her health issues, which were exacerbated by malnutrition. With your help, we can help get 2016 off to a better start for other Guatemalan children.

Transparency: Statistics and Smiles

The world of the internet creates instant connections, fast information and compelling press coverage. Those are the positive components of this wonderful and crazy time we live in where people expect and can obtain service faster than I can write these words. Want a document translated? Google Translate will do it for you in sixty seconds or less. Can't find your favorite restaurant in the behemoth geographic area known as New York City? Click your favorite directional app and the information is in the palm of your hand. 
In this new age that is lived in nanoseconds of gratification, we as a nonprofit can't afford (literally) to delay in getting information to prospective donors. Philanthropically minded people want to know who, where, why and when their money will/could/should be spent. 
In the interest of time, we won't give you graphs, lists and lectures. You can access information detailing our financial and administrative transparency by clicking on the GoodGiving logo to the right of this blog post.  
And just in case you still need some tangible evidence that Children of the Americas performs big miracles on little people, here is Celee. 

In this photo, taken when Celee was discovered in her village (left) she was wrapped in soiled rags that were tied around her stomach because of a birth defect that could not be surgically repaired in Guatemala. Celee's mother loved her daughter enough to trust Children of the Americas to fly her baby to New Jersey, live with a COTA foster family, get her donated surgery accomplished and return her when we were done working our miracles.  
Which is exactly what we did. A baby who was living in the mountains of Guatemala with a hole in her abdomen is now back in the arms of a mother who was both loving and desperate all in the same measure.  The trust Celee's mother had is something COTA has earned time and again...over 110 times in fact; one sick child who is returned to a Mayan mother at a time. 
Children of the Americas leaves for our next medical/surgical/dental team trip in two months. There will be more mothers with sick babies waiting for us. There always are. 

The portal to donate toward this upcoming mission trip is here. 

COTA Fundraiser Link

Transparency is a wonderful thing. 

So is Celee's smile.

 

What Ever Happened to Ever?

Remember this toddler? 

Children of the Americas 2015 Team Members do. Our triage volunteers first met him after he and his mother stood in our intake line for many hours this past January in San Benito, Guatemala. Our pediatrician consulted with his mother  when she was called into the clinic room for the much anticipated physical evaluation of her son. The COTA pediatric nurses bonded with Ever and his mother when it was determined that this toddler's problem was beyond our ability to correct on a team and he must be evaluated for our stateside program. While on our pediatric ward we interviewed Ever's mother, taught her about her son's birth malformation and gave her the first-ever colostomy bags she had ever received for her son's open colostomy on his lower abdomen. How many mothers reading this blog post can imagine caring for an active toddler with an open solid waste portal on his abdomen....without any type of containment system?

Children of the Americas leaves every Guatemalan medical team with three of four stateside referrals; children who are beyond the technical scope of our surgical abilities to care for within the confines of working in a Central American hospital. Finding care for these children in United States hospitals that are struggling with caring for our own citizens is an art form that requires dedication, many hours of paperwork and the combined efforts of 4-5 COTA volunteers.

In other words, any child who ends up traveling to the U.S. for donated care wins the "COTA lottery."

Collaboration when attempting to heal the complex medical needs of a Guatemalan child with a birth anomaly is essential and the final details with all of the partners are being worked out for Ever's travel to the states in two months. 

As hard as COTA volunteers worked on Ever's behalf, his mother worked harder. She called our volunteer, Bernice, every two weeks as instructed. She prayed, walked to high hills to get cell phone service, traveled 10 hours each way on a chicken bus to get her son's diagnostic studies done and she never lost hope. Here are the conditions under which she parents her sick son:

The Petén area of Guatemala is hot country. The family lives "en la montaña", out in the country, in a wooden structure, without electricity. They cook with firewood; they sleep on the floor.
There is a small wooden structure in the town that they use whenever they need to go to town, but they mainly live in the countryside far from town where they cultivate corn, the basic food crop. When we talked today, all the family was planting corn.  
For cash, the father and the older boys look for seasonal work on plantations, not necessarily nearby. When they don't have to work their own land they go to a plantation for weeks at a time. Delmy's father estimates he earns about Q.2000.00 a year. At the 
present exchange rate of about Q7.6/$ that would be $ 263.00 per year. Of course, everybody in the family has to do something to help get some cash.
I asked if they wanted to say anything to the people who will be receiving their information. Delmy's father said one word: Agradecimiento (Gratitude).
  Several weeks ago Delmy and her father brought Ever to Guatemala City for a required barium enema test. They traveled all night by bus and arrived at 6.a.m. We had helped them with bus fare. When they finished with the test it was around noon. I took them to the bus station to buy a return ticket. Delmy's father said they would take the night bus back, because it was cheaper. I insisted they take an earlier bus rather than sit all those hours in the bus station, since they would have to buy food, etc while waiting. He really didn't want to spend more of COTA's money than necessary. I talked with him about the effort the family would have to make to fulfill the requirements for Ever to get the surgery in the USA, and told him there was still no guarantee they would find the volunteer hospital and surgeon after all their efforts. He simply said: "Whatever it takes to help this child be well and have a better life, we'll do it." 

Written by Bernice Kita, Guatemalan volunteer 

There is more of this story to be shared in the next blog post. Details on the organization who has agreed to gift Ever with donated surgery; his future travel to obtain his care; the adjustments his mother must make as she takes her first plane ride and leaves her family behind so that Ever can get the surgery he needs. It will be their story to tell, and ours to share as we collaborate in bringing the pieces of adventure together for Ever's journey to health.