Dulces, pasteles y gaseosas

A busy Monday at the clinic - it seems that patients all over the world store up their complaints over the weekend and unleash them on sleepy-eyed medical staff on Monday mornings. Our own slow reflexes were helped along by the entrepreneurial lady across the road from the clinic, who has realised she can make a tidy little profit by opening up the back of her house to sleepy-eyed workers and offering them nourishing breakfasts of eggs and tortillas, cooked from her own tiny kitchen along with her childrens`meals, and hot, sweet coffee to spurt them into life.

Everything here has a tonne of azucar (sugar) added. They squeeze wonderful fresh , sticky orange juice then add four tablespooms of sugar. They make strong, aromatic Guatemalan coffee, add four tablespoons of sugar, then bring it to your table with more sugar for you to add yourself. The towering, brightly iced cakes adorning the windows of the many pastelerias seem to be sugar, flour, sugar, eggs, sugar, food colouring and a sprinkle of radioactively-coloured sugar sprinkles on top. Everywhere you go, you are accosted by young boys selling dulces (sweets) out of carrier bags. Even that sweetest of condiments, ketchup, is abnormally high in the addictive white crystal here. They make tart, refreshing limonada by squeezing fresh limes, and then take the taste away with sickly sweetness. And you cannot buy a `diet` fizzy drink (gaseosa) anywhere - the only one I have found is CocaCola Light, and that is a rarity, most drinks being lurid green or fluorescent orange and leaving a sticky coating over your teeth and gums.

Needless to say, dental hygiene in Guatemala is poor. Glints of gold flash at you from all directions as mothers smile when they bring their children to the clinic, and the children themselves have holes in teeth, whole teeth missing, and when they say `aagh`for you to inspect their throat, globules of cakes and sweets and slimy orange specks from `tortrix`crisps grin out at you, promising future damage.


In three weeks so far, I have seen five dental abscesses, at least fifty sets of damaged teeth, and one hundred children lining up for the dentist before hearing the pneumatic drilling sound that makes your bones shiver, the children leaving shell-shocked with their sore mouths stuffed full of wodges of cotton wool.


We try to teach them about dental hygiene. We sing a song about brushing your teeth three times a day, after every meal. We talk about not drinking fizzy pop, or eating sweets. And we give every child a toothbrush. But Guatemalan children are the same as any others - they love sweet things. Poor families associate sweets and cola and cakes with affluence and the developed world, and so desire them. Isn`t that a wonderful legacy to put our names to? The sugar trade seems to have caused rather a large amount of damage in this world, both political and physical.

I was bitterly disappointed when after one health education class, I watched the childrem, who had so attentively joined in the lesson, ran out to their waiting mothers and starting gulping down cola, munching on crisps, playing in the mud first and not washing their hands. Someone told me once you have to hear a message seven times before you start to either remember it or believe it, and therefore act on it.


So this is one long-term project of changing human habits, always a difficult task. But it is being achieved, bite by little bite.