Programs

* Village Medical Clinic Program * Surgical Program * Casa de Fe * Dental Program

* Hearing Program * VIA/Cryo Program * Orthopedics and Prosthetics Program

Village Medical Clinic Program:

Our village clinics are conducted in areas of the greatest need in the farthest reaches of Guatemala. Prior to the beginning our season, Guatemalan volunteers travel to each village to meet with our dedicated, local Guatemalan volunteer leadership, viewing the school or church where our temporary clinic will be housed. We also discuss with the leadership, the support it will provide during the clinic. These dedicated Guatemalan volunteers organize the clinics long before our team arrives.

During each season, our medical teams travel to these rural villages and conduct medical clinics. Upon arrival, our medical teams are typically met by hundreds of patients each day. Many patients travel for hours; and stand in line for many hours more. They quietly and patiently wait to see one of our physicians.

Our physicians treat open wounds, infections, dental pain, parasites and other serious health conditions. During the village clinic, our volunteers work side by side with the local volunteer leadership. In addition to providing for a patient’s basic medical care needs, the medical teams identify surgical candidates to be referred to the Obras hospital in Antigua or to one of our other partnering hospitals.

Surgical candidates receive detailed information regarding the specific date and location where their surgeries will be performed. This also includes details regarding how they, and a family member, will be transported from their village to Antigua, where one of our surgical teams will perform the surgery in the months to come. Our local Guatemalan partners accompany the patients to the designated hospital to receive their surgery on their scheduled date. In 2011, the medical teams treated more than 20,000 patients in our medical clinics. We provided more than 1,500 surgical referrals to patients in the villages.

Surgical Program:

Our surgical teams treat the patients referred by our medical teams. The surgeries are performed at one of the three partnering hospitals. The first and primary location for our surgeries is Las Obras Sociales del Santo Hermano Pedro Hospital and Orphanage in Antigua, Guatemala. In 2006, Faith In Practice completed the expansion and renovation of the operating rooms at Hermano Pedro. This hospital now has five state-of-the-art operating rooms. We have partnerships with additional locations where surgeries are performed, most notably, Hospital Corpus Christi, Patzun; and Hospital Hilario Galindo, Retalhuleu. In each of these hospitals, Faith In Practice has invested, and is investing, significant funds to remodel and equip the facilities to ensure a safe environment for both our surgical teams and for our patients.

Our surgical teams represent the following specialties: ENT, Gynecology, General, Orthopedic, Plastics and Urology. Our surgeons perform surgeries ranging from extensive scoliosis repair and total hip and knee replacements to simple tumor removals. In 2011, Faith In Practice surgical teams performed more than 1,500 surgeries.

Casa de Fe:

Our Casa de Fe is a 100 bed patient guest house located in Antigua, Guatemala. Since 2003, our patients and their families have found clean beds, received hot meals, and recovered in the safety and comfort of the Casa. The Casa is a haven for our surgical patients who rarely have enough money to travel or buy food during their trip to the hospital. Before Casa de Fe, patients slept on the streets prior to the surgeries and walked or rode in the back of pick-up trucks, after their surgeries, to return home. We also provide food and housing for our patients who receive surgeries at our other partnering hospitals throughout Guatemala.

Casa de Fe houses a Chapel which is used as additional resting space to mothers and their children when the Casa is overflowing with patients. Their resting in the chapel is very fitting for this is truly a ministry that strives to follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ to heal the sick. It is always touching to be approached by patients that received surgeries asking how they can help at the Casa or where they can volunteer. They ask, many times, shortly after returning from the hospital. Our patients’ gratitude always humbles us.

Make a life-changing gift to Casa de Fe through the dedication of a Tile in honor or in memory of a special person.

Dental Program:

This program includes dental surgeries for the incapacitated residents that live at the Obras, pain relief and tooth extraction in the villages, and a Preventative and Restorative Program where volunteers teach health and dental hygiene in the schools in Antigua, Retalhuleu, and Sarstoon. In 2011, we equipped a new dental clinic in San Agustin, El Progreso.

Hearing Program:

This program dispenses solar powered hearing aids through our ENT physicians and audiologists who serve on village medical teams. For those with hearing loss in the villages, a traditional hearing aid is cost prohibitive as are the replacement batteries for those aids. For these, a solar powered hearing aid gives the gift of hearing for years. We also have audiologists treat patients at the Obras’ clinic in conjunction with our ENT surgeons. In partnership with the Obras, we expanded this program with a new audiology clinic and sound proof booth allowing us to better serve our patients both in the villages and at the Obras.

VIA/Cryo Program:

This program is designed to teach local Guatemalan practitioners to recognize and treat pre-cancerous cervical cells. Women are needlessly dying in Guatemala due to cervical cancer. It is the number 1 killer of women in that country. For every one woman who dies in the United States of cervical cancer, eight die in Guatemala. One of our practitioners broke down in the villages when he saw 5 advanced cases of cervical cancer, more than the total number of cases he had seen in his 30 years of practice, in the US. This program is empowering Guatemalans and saving women’s lives. Since its inception, more than 50,000 women have been screened. Countless more are being screened by those who received training through this program.

Orthopedics and Prosthetics Program:

This program provides braces, prostheses, and wheelchairs for our patients in Guatemala, young and old. Faith In Practice provides braces for children undergoing treatment, via the Ponseti method, to correct club feet and other orthopedic deformities. In the cases where our surgical teams need to amputate limbs, Faith In Practice provides these patients with prostheses to return them to wholeness as much as possible. Faith In Practice also provides customized and refurbished wheelchairs for disabled children and adults. Through this program, Faith In Practice provides these basic, yet desperately needed, items that transform the lives of those who suffer from various conditions.

Share The Mission

"For it is in giving that we receive."

Our Goals

To demonstrate, by our actions, the love of God and to provide an opportunity for the spiritual growth of our volunteers in various settings.

To connect the practice of medicine and dentistry and our service to our brothers and sisters in Central America to our individual faith journey.

To present Christian core values in a way that is non-threatening and informative to those volunteers whose beliefs are different from ours.

Affirmation of Faith

Faith in Practice is an ecumenical Christian ministry. It is committed to the core beliefs of the Christian faith, while respecting diversity of expression.

In accordance with the history of the church, we affirm the following core beliefs:

We believe in God:
who has created and is creating,
who has come in the true Man, Jesus,
to reconcile and make new,
who works in us and others by his Spirit.
We trust him.

He calls us to be his church:
to celebrate his presence,
to love and serve others,
to seek justice and resist evil,
to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen, our judge and our hope.

In life, in death, in life beyond death,
God is with us.
We are not alone.

Thanks be to God.

Affirmation of Practice

Lord, make us instruments
of your peace.
Where there is hatred let us sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is discord, union;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.
Grant that we may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood
as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving
that we receive;
It is in pardoning
that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are
born to eternal life.

-St. Francis of Assisi