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Photo by Geoffrey D. Brown
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By Geoffrey D. Brown
News-Post Staff
gbrown@fredericknewspost.com
ZACAPA, Guatemala — For most of the mission team from the Frederick Church of the Brethren, the feel, the rhythm, the smell of Guatemala is not new. But for several members, the senses are bombarded with something strange and powerful.
A jumble of smells, few of them pleasant, some intoxicating, invade the nostrils of the missionaries and helpers as they load into trucks and head to their destinations.
The most pervasive smell from the edges of Guatemala City 100 miles eastward to Zacapa is an acrid, thick wood smoke that carries a trace of spice. If it were solid you could hack this smell apart with one of the $3 machetes available at the market and hardware stores.
Between wafts of smoke from time to time drift darker smells — urine and feces, especially. In the villages, a characteristic odor sometimes blends all the others — the smell of the mud, perhaps, that has absorbed equal parts smoke and dung but also has its own rich tang.
In the Zacapa region the landscape is lush, a contrast from previous trips by the mission, when the weather was 20 degrees hotter and most of the landscape burned by the sun. But in mid-June the rainy season has turned a normally brown land green. The missionaries are ready for the rain, but it rarely comes during the day. It pours down in sheets at night, so hard one night that it rained sideways into the bunk room through the window louvers.
Water is a constant topic. Avoid drinking it, everyone cautions. Don’t sing in the shower in case water gets in your mouth.
Dirt is another source of worry. Mission leader Dr. Julian Choe’s philosophy — and what he believes helps keep him healthy — is to avoid getting dirty at all costs. Third-world dirt carries many organisms to make a missionary sick.
Throughout the mission Dr. Choe stands straight and spotless among the increasingly dusty, tattered missionaries. His antipathy to dirt is so great that on a trip into the Puente Blanco refugee camp, he shrieked in horror as the truck bounced through a puddle and his shirt was specked with a single spot of mud. In the car ahead, two in the group had been liberally sprayed with mud, but the greater fear was for Dr. Choe.
He was no longer spotless. What this meant for the mission nobody knew. But Dr. Choe managed to finish the trip mostly healthy, except for a head cold he brought home. Nearly everyone else in the group became sick at some point, some of them twice, and it was nearly impossible to identify what made them sick.
Pastor Butch Reinhold of Charles Town, W.Va., returned from the trip and immediately became violently ill. He ended up in a hospital to have his gallbladder removed. Whether the infection was related to a something he may have picked up on the mission was unclear.