Guatemala’s Disheartening Problem: Malnutrition

ABC News On Campus reporter Miles Doran blogs: 

I feel like I’m in the middle of an Indiana Jones movie. Tonight University of Florida student journalist Casey Lawson had the pleasant surprise of finding a scorpion on the shower curtain in the girls   bathroom. We had prepared for a lot of things on this trip, but I don’t think scorpions were ever covered in any of our lectures.

It was about  3 inches long with its stinger sticking up. With the help of a palm frond and a plastic cup, we knocked it off the shower curtain and onto the tile floor. Then we trapped it with a blue plastic cup and slid it across the shower floor, through the bathroom and to the sidewalk outside. That’s when we flung it into the air in the direction of the neighboring building, where, as it turns out, our class leader sleeps. Uh oh.

Now that we’re further into our week in Guatemala, all of our stories are starting to come together. UF senior Rikki Klaus and I are working on a story about a 21-year-old named Jose who travels to the rural parts of Guatemala in search of malnourished children. Then he tries to convince the parents to let him take the children to get help.

On Tuesday we traveled with him to a mountain village,  where the homes were more like one-room huts, made of mud, straw and sticks. It was quite the adventure just to get there. Inside one of the huts we found a  2-year-old girl, at left, severely malnourished. (Photo courtesy of Casey Lawson). She was a tiny creature — twigs for arms and legs  –  just skin and bones. After about 30 minutes of discussion, Jose finally convinced the parents to let him take the little girl to get help. He even offered to take them with him too. We rushed the crying girl and her parents to the nutritional center to get cleaned and checked out. This 2-year-old girl weighed  9 pounds, 3 ounces. That’s how much a 2-month-old girl should weigh. She needed more help. Fast.

The town lost its only doctor two months ago, so we had to take her to a pediatrician in Gualan, which is about 20 minutes away. After examining her, he said if the child not been rescued then, she likely would have died within the month. The tests and treatments could not be done at the pediatrician’s office, so again,  we jumped back into the pickup truck and raced to the emergency room at Zacapa hospital. The little girl could stay there for up to two  weeks, then she will be moved to a nutritional center where  her recovery will continue. Within the next 24 hours,  Jose rescued four more children.

If this had happened in the United States, the parents would have been arrested and jailed. It seems like this isn’t the case here in Guatemala. Nearly half of the children under  5  in this country suffer from chronic malnutrition. The problem here is so big and so widespread that if the U.S. laws were applied and enforced here, the jails would likely be overflowing with parents of malnourished children. But is it the parents’  fault? Or does the government deserve to be blamed? Those are questions Rikki and I are hoping to answer as we continue to shoot our story.