Healing hands: St. Clair College students bring hope and healthcare to Guatemala on life-changing mission

Three St. Clair College students and their professor recently embarked on a life-changing journey to Guatemala, using their pharmacy skills to bring essential healthcare to those in need. (Source: Kaitlyn Harnden/St. Clair College)

Three St. Clair College students and their professor recently embarked on a life-changing journey to Guatemala, using their pharmacy skills to bring essential healthcare to those in need.

Second-year pharmacy technician students Jerry Sikl, Morgan Merritt, and Sanaa Shaaya, along with Professor Kaitlyn Harnden, joined the local mission group Guatemala Hope on a 10-day trip to the village of El Triunfo.

Their goal: to provide critical medical assistance to families with limited access to healthcare.

“We also had a team of nurses, doctors, dentists. They also had some engineers there providing helping [sic] with the water,” Sikl explained. “It was a good learning experience.”

Over the course of the mission, the team helped administer medications to nearly 1,100 patients, which they said made a profound impact on both the villagers and the students themselves.

El Triunfo is a remote village where access to healthcare is scarce, and residents often must travel long distances for even the most basic medical treatment.

“I wanted to help, and when you leave something like that, you feel fulfilled,” Sikl said. “There were things that I learned as a student which will help me, but there’s also things I’ll carry on through life.”

While Guatemala Hope has been sending teams of doctors, nurses, and engineers for 25 years - this was the first time pharmacy technicians were included in the mission.

The students played a crucial role in ensuring proper dosages, dispensing medications with Spanish instructions, and stretching limited supplies to serve as many patients as possible. Their involvement helped the pharmacy run more efficiently than ever before, reinforcing the importance of having technicians as part of these medical missions.

Sikl continued, “It was exciting because as far as on a student level, it was like we’re kind of pioneering that. Hopefully it continues. It’d be great to hear that ten years down the road, you know, St. Clair College is still part of that. I don’t know what the outcome will be, but, you know, it feels fulfilling.”

Officials said beyond El Triunfo, the team also visited nearby villages like El Tigre, where conditions were even more dire. Many residents live in makeshift shacks with dirt floors and drink water from wells that run brown. Despite these hardships, the people they encountered showed immense gratitude for the assistance they received.

“It was amazing,” exclaimed Guatemala Hope Director of Operations, Louise Elliott.

“It was like a dream come true,” Elliott stated. “We’ve been small and slowly building up over the years, but to have the opportunity to have pharmacy tech students just raised our clinic up a phenomenal amount.”

Elliott said, “For the majority of the villagers, we’re the only people that they see in a year. So it’s the healthcare that they get. There is small little nursing pockets, but it’s if they come, when they come, and if they have medicines available,”

She told CTV News the hope is to have the partnership with St. Clair College continue, with plans to return to Guatemala in January 2026. “To have the pharmacy team be able to keep up and never have a wait, it just means so much for people on the other end who have sat all day in the sun and gets them home a little earlier. It makes it a lot easier on our doctors and also our translators. So it’s just a win-win all the way around.”

For the students, the trip was not only a professional learning experience but also a deeply emotional and cultural one. They immersed themselves in village life, listened to personal stories, and even found a few moments of reflection, watching sunsets over the Pacific after long days of work.

“It’s one thing to talk about to students about being in a field of service in healthcare, but when you are hearing their real life stories of partaking in that, I mean, it really does give you goosebumps,” explained School of Health Sciences Chair, Stephanie De Franceschi. “I think that it’s something that they will be changed forever for and I think that’s something we’re really proud of, that we were a part of that journey with them to help teach them that.”

De Franceschi said the experience highlighted the impact of education beyond the classroom and showcased how skilled students can make a real difference in the world.

“These students are also going to be presenting to our other faculty and staff and students, in the School of Health Sciences and Nursing, because it’s one thing for me to say it, but then when other students and other staff are hearing it from the experiences that these students have had, I think that is much more impactful than anything I could stand up in front of a room and say,” De Franceschi added.