Free Rabies Shots

Sean just left on a bus headed back to the airport in Guatemala City :-( It was so fun having him here. I tried to act like a tour guide and show him around, but really I just drug him around while I got us lost :-)

After Sean had been in Xela for a whole hour, I took him hiking up in the mountains near La Pedrera. We wandered around exploring some cool agricultural areas and villages. It was a great hike. Well... great except for the part where we were chased by a pack of dogs which bit Sean in the calf.

He´s okay thanks to the generosity of the Guatemalan health care system. We went to a local public hospital near my house for the first rabies shot. The staff was really nice and gave Sean the shot for free, but told us we´d have to go to the health department for the second dose three days later.

The idea of manuevering a health department in the US in English is pretty overwhelming to me, so I was pretty scared of trying it here. However, it wasn´t as bad as I´d thought. We definitely had to bounce around to different lines and tell the story a few times, but I´m pretty sure we got Sean the right kind of shot! But with my lousy Spanish, who knows! We were told that a rabies shot would be quite expensive, but again it was free. The nurse said it´s part of the service to Guatemalan people and they were happy to share the same service with us. Sean wrote a really nice thank you card to the guatemalan healthcare system, but I´m not sure where to send it.

The rest of the trip was time spent at Lake Atitlan and on chicken buses, but I´ll write more about that later.