MUSCATINE, Iowa — The Polaroid photo that visitors from Muscatine snapped was the first photo of their own smiling faces that some Guatemalan children in La Nueva Gomera had ever seen.

The 28 members of Calvary Church who traveled to the village, located about four miles from the Pacific coast, worked to make the Guatemalan residents smile — and make those smiles a little healthier — during a trip there from Feb. 8-16.

“I can’t tell you when the last time I had a patient hug me here in Iowa,” said Barb Gipple, a church member who practices dentistry in West Burlington, as she described the “heartfelt gratefulness” Guatemalans showed her.

Gipple was part of a team within the group that provided medical assistance to villagers, including dental care. Another team connected with children, and a construction team helped build a new church out of cement blocks to replace the powerless stick building where Gipple filled and sealed teeth with a Guatemalan pastor who also extracted teeth.

The 8-10 church members on the construction team, who spoke only English, worked with 4-5 villagers who spoke only Spanish to set up the first five of 14 rows of cement blocks that will form the new Protestant church.

“We would try to talk about family, God, just little things

throughout the day to try to make a connection with the guys working next to us,” said James Riley, a church member who worked with the construction team. “A lot of [informal] sign language. You know, if one picture can say 1,000 words, I don’t know how many I drew with my hands.”

Calvary members raised money to pay for their travel costs and supplies for their work in Guatemala. Riley said the construction team purchased materials for building the church and tools, that turned out to be less effective than the villagers’ machete knives.

“You can use a machete for anything, anything!” Riley said. “Chopping blocks, you just whack away at it and you can crack a block easier with a machete than a grinder.”

Unlike the machete, Gipple said the tools she used in her dental clinic were “not near as primitive as I went into it thinking they would be.

“It was just like having my little dental unit at the office. Everything there was the same, except for what we use to sterilize and it [the unit] just doesn’t have the same speed running off a generator — but still very doable,” she said.

Church members took turns shining a flashlight into patients’ mouths, which Gipple said suffered “pretty rampant decay” from likely never having visited a dentist.

“It was pretty amazing to hold a flashlight for a dentist and watch teeth being pulled,” Riley said.

“This trip does give you grace to cover lots of icky stuff you can’t handle here,” said Linda Jones, who worked on the kids team. “For some reason, you get to Guatemala and you can handle that.”

Lonnie Mason, another member of the medical team, worked in a pharmacy attached to a clinic located across from a soccer field near the church where Gipple worked. He said the pharmacy passed out vitamins, Children’s Tylenol and other over-the-counter remedies they brought from Iowa, and distributed medications furnished and prescribed by a missionary doctor.

Mason said he also conducted blood sugar tests, and treated minor wounds.

“This one mother would bring her 4-year-old to us with dog bites, and we would spend an hour cleaning the lacerations,” Mason said. Dog bites are common, he said, because “there’s just mangy, wild dogs everywhere.”

“Every once in awhile, we’d get Lonnie over the the kids and he was our best hair-cutter guy,” said the Rev. Bruce Martin, who led the group trip to Guatemala.

“You saw a lot of the same families and got to really connect with them,” Mason said.

In addition to cutting hair, Jones said the kids’ group painted children’s fingernails, braided their hair, played soccer, flew kites, jumped rope and made balloon animals with them.

“We tried to keep that to a minimum because they’d just go berserk when we pulled out the balloons,” Jones said.

She said some children would carry around a broken balloon for days. “Just anything that we give them is just like gold to them. … They crave just crave that attention. It’s not that they’re not loved in their homes. Their parents are just so busy trying to make ends meet,” Gipple said.

Jones said the church gave families a tote bag that included toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap and shampoo. Children received fluoride treatments at school, and coloring books that described in Spanish how to be healthy by washing their hands and brushing their teeth.

The tote also included pencils and composition notebooks. “We were told they didn’t have textbooks in the schools so the teacher writes everything on the board and they have to copy it down into the composition notebooks,” Jones said.

Extra notebooks were given to teachers.

Martin said the trip was a success for the Guatemalan community and the medical missionary team with which Calvary partnered.

“We bring a lot of joy and we encourage them to continue on,” he said.

Martin said the two groups have worked together in the past because the church believes in the way the missionary doctor “works on the physical needs first, and then works back to the spiritual.”

He said church members “go to serve, but we receive more than we give.”

Jones said the reward for helping others is a “payment of genuine hugs and smiles.”

Reporter contact information

Jennifer Meyer: 563-262-0525

jennifer.meyer@muscatinejournal.com

Details

What: Report on trip to Guatemala, sharing stories and photos

When: 7 p.m., Sunday, March 9

Where: Calvary Church, 501 U.S. Highway 61 Bypass, Muscatine

Who: Public invited

Online

www.calvaryonline.org