a Team leader’s Reflections from Guatemala at the Start of a New Year
Where Care is Currency: Hope from the Mayan Communities of Jutiapa
This week marks the successful close of Emergency Project’s and Envision Healthcare’s first joint mission of 2026 in Guatemala’s rugged southern highlands, serving 31 indigenous Mayan communities – a mission I helped seed in prior deployments. The paths to these communities are often taxing -- long truck hauls up rutted tracks, followed by arduous hikes to homes without electricity, lit only by flickering lamps on earthen floors -- yet the labor we put in is always dwarfed by what we take back.On my first visit last year, I witnessed a sister feeding and cleaning her brother, once able-bodied, now permanently disabled by seizures—her care, a daily ritual of devotion.
An elderly woman caring for her grandchildren urged us to sit in the single chair in her one-room home, her hospitality a quiet rebuke to scarcity. Another elder guided us through her garden of herbal remedies, vibrant flowers, and hardy crops, insisting we partake in her labors of love. A priest there, shepherding dozens of orphaned, resource-starved children, builds community as currency beyond any tariff, reminding us that bonds outlast borders.
These Mayan families extend a generosity that shames our world’s divisions, even as they endure the Western Hemisphere’s starkest health gaps. Maternal mortality among Indigenous Guatemalan women occurs at triple the national average and over 1100% our rates in the US, with infant losses similarly staggering.
Our team works quietly there: training local providers, delivering essentials, and deploying tools like Butterfly’s palm-sized ultrasound to pierce long-standing disparities and safeguard mothers and infants in moments that can rewrite outcomes; life breathing back into once-suffocating futures.
In the midst of incomprehensible global suffering, I feel hope in these spaces not because we have the answers, but because the generosity I see in those we serve is mirrored in the practitioners who find the work sustaining, humbling, regenerative.
Witnessing this everyday humanity—between practitioners, Mayan families, and local partners—reminds me what can still be built, what refuses to break.
I’m grateful for the chance to feel optimism amid the current climate of despair, sadness, and outrage, sustained by connection with the communities we’re privileged to serve. Thank you to The Emergency Project, Envision, and too many communities to name — from the West Bank to Chimanimani to Jutiapa and beyond.
May 2026 carry forward this spirit: connection rooted in shared purpose, defiance that endures, so beautifully exemplified by this honorable work in this storied community.
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If this resonates with you, please share what everyday acts of humanity have helped you find purpose in dark times. Let’s make 2026 about what endures.
- Sahil Bhatia
