Fight Rising Malnutrition in Rural Guatemala

We are thrilled to share that thanks to the hard work of our Medical Director, Waleska López Canu, every member of the Wuqu’ Kawoq team has had their first Covid vaccination! She worked tirelessly with the Ministry of Health to make this happen so that we can continue our work in the field at full strength. Our next priority is getting our patients in rural Guatemala vaccinated. During our nutrition visits, we offer information about the importance of vaccines and address any of our patients’ concerns about safety to make sure they’re ready once vaccines become more widely available. 

We’re also excited to share the launch of our new study, Saqmolo’ (“egg” in the Mayan language Kaqchiquel). We are contributing to global research investigating impact of adding a daily serving of eggs to standard nutrition care. The results in other settings have been mixed. For example, in Malawi, the egg intervention had no overall effect on child development. This study will provide new evidence to help make future nutrition interventions as effective as possible.

These important developments, along with your support, help strengthen our work to reverse the course of the many children struggling with acute malnutrition in rural Guatemala.

Pictured below is Fátima, who became an orphan at 11 months when her mother, who was raising her alone, died from complications of diabetes, a condition that she could not afford to treat. Fátima is now under the care of her aunt, Doña Manuela, who also has an 18-month-old daughter. As a result of her mother’s illness and death, Fátima is severely undernourished, but she’s getting better. We have been working with Doña Manuela to space out breast feedings and supplement her own nutrition so that she is able to feed both girls and raise them as healthy sisters.

We are so grateful to you for making this work possible! 

Links:

• Visit our website.
• Learn more about our programs!

We are excited to share this great new BBC radio piece in which  17-year-old Rosa Angelica, from the community of Sololá, explores Guatemala’s halting progress toward the UN development goal of Zero Hunger. She interviews our Nutrition Program Manager Karyn Choy and Executive Director Anne Kraemer about how it came to be that families living amidst fields of crops have little access to nutritious food—and Guatemala, a major agricultural producer, has one of the highest rates of chronic child malnutrition in the world. 

They also talk about our comprehensive approach to working with families and communities to reverse malnutrition. “This isn’t something you can solve overnight;” Anne says. “It’s not something that you can fix with one pill. So the minimum time that we spend with a family doing education, providing them with food supplementation, medical care, is six months.”

In a commentary reflecting on his 15 years of work in this field, our Chief Medical Officer Peter Rohloff underscores the importance of cultivating broad-based efforts to transform the social and economic forces driving child malnutrition while also keeping each individual child and family in view.

He writes: “It is tempting to think of big problems like stunting only in aggregate, as national or global issues to be addressed incrementally. But the enteropathy, growth faltering, and developmental challenges that the child you see today in your clinic is a very real and urgent suffering. That child's caregivers may have few resources at their disposal and perhaps little hope that things can get better.”

Thank you for making it possible for us to make real progress across communities and partner with families to find hope in the fight against chronic malnutrition!

Links:

• Read our chief medical officer's report from the front lines