One more thing that the COVID has brought back is the preference of delivering a baby at home. For the first time since I came to Guatemala, this past week, I had the blessing of being part of a delivery of a baby boy at the home of a young couple. Even though, I have delivered babies before, it has always been in a hospital setting.

It never cross my mind to be a home midwife but when the alternatives pushed me

to the need of the mothers who have no other choice, I had to ask The Lord to please provide once more the safest environment we can have in the middle of what it is available.

A normal delivery is not as complicated as it may sound and, at the end, there is nothing but God’s mercy what brings a new life into the world and into a specific family! In the back of my mind there will always be this questions: What if the baby does not breath ok?  What if she bleeds to death? What if something goes wrong and I don’t have the proper equipment or the experience to deal with the complication? What if the power goes off? What if the baby or the mother gets infected due to the poor sanitary conditions? What if….what if….. what if….. on the other side, what if I don’t come? What if they have any or all these problems and have to deal with them by themselves? I am happy to be there with them and see the goodness of God over us with the confidence that He will bring the gift of life and hope once more.

There is no better time to pray than when we are afraid. Afraid to get the virus, afraid of dying from it, afraid to go to a hospital for something as normal as a delivery and getting the baby exposed to the sick people at the hospital. Private clinics are too expensive for most of them and the cultural midwifes don’t follow the protocols we would like to. Again, Glory be to God for the mercies we see in every case.

There is so much to do in this field. For now, a new area of service for our clinic is a new need and we will be working on this in the near future.

As for the COVID update, San Pedro is still without cases. We have had 5 people from the village infected in other areas of the country who are passing the quarantine here, so far with no spread from them. The hospitals of the rest of the country are overcrowded and laboratories are not sufficient to perform all the tests needed. The numbers are not the real ones, but we are trying to learn how to live with the disease as the rest of the world is.

Amazing grace is my song for this time of crisis and it is true that when tragedies happen there is only one way to look at reality and it is from the eternal perspective.

And, until we get there, we have Emmanuel with us.

With love in Jesus Christ,

Luz Elena