A team of Monadnock Region health care workers, teachers, and social workers are preparing for a week-long trip to educate, skill share, and deliver goods to rural Panajachel, Guatemala in February.
The team is organized through the Dulce Vida Alliance, a nonprofit that Kate McCarthy of Bennington founded last year.
McCarthy said she was inspired after observing the plight of desperate Guatemalans at the border between the US and Mexico. She said she was struck by the desperation that “makes a woman know the dangers of walking across… miles of desert and do it anyway.” McCarthy has a 12-year-old daughter, Dulce, who was adopted from Guatemala as a baby, and said she thought about her daughter among the children at the border.
McCarthy said Dulce was involved as they decided on the best way to help Guatemalans in their own country, and they ultimately opted to partner with Funda Maya, a nonprofit that promotes education, well-being, and empowerment from the Guatemalan town of Panajachel.
“We have a lot of skills,” McCarthy said of her organization, but they wished to defer to an organization with better local connections and cultural knowledge to ensure they would “support a community, not just throw… ideas at it.”
McCarthy said she sees this trip as an initial venture of many for the nonprofit, which will likely home in on a specialization over time. Currently, she said a team of ten with backgrounds in social work, teaching, psychiatry, acupuncture, nursing, and veterinary medicine are set to participate in the first weeklong trip.
“We are delighted to have the Dulce Vida group come to work with us,” said Funda Maya co-founder Sharon Smart. Smart said that the team, offering their professional skills on a volunteer basis, will help to bolster many of the programs the indigenous-run Funda Maya is implementing.
The American volunteers, assisted by translators, will be helping to assess and treat the medical and pain management needs of the locals, spay and neuter homeless animals, teach CPR to local bomberos, or firefighters, exchange skills with local teachers and deliver age-appropriate classes on substance abuse prevention and sex education.
McCarthy said that currently, the Dulce Vida Alliance is most in need of donations for logistical support. She said she has two garage bays full of donations at her house and no funds to ship them. Donated goods vary from toothbrushes and toothpaste and puzzles and toys for children to firefighting jackets and three jaws of life tools for the local bomberos. McCarthy said that anybody interested in donating funds or goods should get in touch, and she also encourages interested donors to look into Funda Maya’s sponsorship program for area schoolchildren.
For more information, visit http://www.dulcevidaalliance.org.