The fight to reduce maternal and infant deaths in Guatemala and Mexico doesn’t usually take place in fully staffed hospitals but in bare-boned rooms hours away
Delfina Vicente López stands at the center of a private ceremony led by a priest inside her home in Aldea Nuevo San Antonio, Guatemala. The priest, moved from traditional Catholic prayers to a trance-like ritual meant to rid the home of negative energy and prepare for the birth of her son.Over three decades, Eiías has become the most active and trusted midwife in her area, taking daily treks to see patients.
“We’ve halved the number of deaths, and that’s definitely a success,” he says. “I don’t think the global community has wasted its time.”The toll of COVID-19 While Guatemala’s Health Ministry declined to comment on criticisms, Ana Luz de León Barrios, of the country’s National Program of Reproductive Health, attributed the lack of health services to logistics.
“Women don’t want to go to the hospital, even if the pregnancy complicates, because they can get infected [with COVID], so they think it's better to do it at home,” Elías says. “They say: ‘If I die, I'm going to die here, not in the hospital.’” Elías Gonzales, left, visits one of her patients, Delfina Vicente López, at her home in Aldea Nuevo San Antonio, Guatemala days before her due date.“I was scared that I would lose my baby,” she said. “But thank God, everything was fine.”
“You feel frustrated because you know you could’ve done more, but in the end, it just wasn't possible,” Alvaro Recinos, who works at a hospital in Guatemala’s second biggest city, says of the patients he’s lost. Nurses line up sets of towels and scissors, preparing for the Cesarean surgery as if they were going to war. Recinos, wearing a Garfield scrub cap and a N95 mask wrapped around his face, snaps on a pair of gloves.
Midwives in the Mayan region have fought a decades-long battle to be recognized by their governments and to bridge the divide with the public health system. Clementa Eluvia Monterroso Romero bathes her newborn grandson Breiner Eduardo Vicente Vasquez inside a temazcal steam bath in her backyard, a tradition that is also done with the new mother to help her relax after a strenuous birth.“While the government doesn’t recognize us, we’re at least doing something important in our community,” she said. “We’ve mixed traditional medicine with Western medicine, and it’s helped a lot.
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