A Home Away From Home
Casa de Fe (“House of Faith”) is a 100-bed patient guest house in Antigua run by Faith In Practice for patients and their families who travel great distances to receive surgery at Las Obras Sociales Hospital with a Faith In Practice surgery team. Casa de Milagros is the patient guest house which offers similar services at Hilario Galindo Hospital in San Felipe, Retalhuleu where Faith In Practice surgery teams also serve.
Casa de Fe and Casa de Milagros provide patients and their family members with a clean, warm, secure place to stay before and after their surgeries. They are provided with coffee, hot meals, showers, toiletries, and have 24-hour access to a prayer chapel. These services could not be provided without the amazing staff who care for Casa de Fe behind the scenes every day—Idalea, Gladys, Gaby, Miriam, Silvia, and Daniela.
U.S. volunteers on Obras Surgery teams also have the opportunity to support this amazing work at Casa de Fe. Volunteers can cook meals and spend time with patients, playing games or doing crafts. This is a great opportunity for non-medical volunteers to make an impact on patients and provide a different but equally valuable type of care. The team blogger on the 908 Wani Surgery Team recently wrote a beautiful reflection about this:
Visiting Casa de Fe today reminded me how a portion of this mission’s impact happens nowhere near an operating room. I got to talk to Gabi, who works in the kitchen. She told me they prepare upwards of 90 meals a day, with real attention to nutrition, because many of the families and patients arriving are malnourished. A warm meal becomes part of the healing. For some families, staying at Casa de Fe also means access to their first hot shower in years. These are not small things. They are the kind of things that restore dignity.
Three members of our team, Marie, Sharon, and Leda, spent much of the week volunteering there. Casa de Fe does not often have extra hands, so their presence was felt. They chopped vegetables, sorted beans, and cooked items to serve for lunch and dinner. All three are tasks that sound simple until you multiply them across dozens of meals, every single day, with no end in sight. But what mattered just as much, maybe more, was the time they spent sitting with patients before and after surgery. They eased nerves, drew pictures with kids who needed a distraction, and held conversations with the guests.
Looking back on the week, it is also important to acknowledge how many people it takes to make something like this possible. Beyond the operating rooms, the work is aided by people preparing food, cleaning rooms, sorting supplies, and transporting patients, with everyone doing their part so that someone else can do theirs.
Casa de Fe is able to serve hundreds of patients throughout the year due to the generous financial support of volunteers and donors when they purchase commemorative tiles as well as other merchandise such as Guatemalan coffee, jewelry, purses, and Faith In Practice branded scrub caps, water bottles and more. All volunteers will have an opportunity to purchase merchandise during their mission trip. Casa de Fe tiles can be purchased at any time through our website: https://www.faithinpractice.org/casa-de-fe-program/.
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Volunteer Recruiting
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