LYNN – Ward 1 Councilor Dr. Peter Meaney, who is also the owner of Broadway Family Dental, and Ward 2 Councilor Obed Matul recently returned from their mission with His Love Foundation to San Marcos, Guatemala.
Matul sits on the executive board of His Love Foundation, and his wife Maribel Matul-Ramirez is the president of the foundation. According to Matul, these missions to Guatemala began in 2017 after a large volcanic eruption.
“That’s where everything kind of started coming from us going down there and helping people,” Matul said.
He further explained his wife’s cousin works for Homeland Security in Guatemala, and the Guatemalan government gives His Love Foundation three options of areas they can visit and provide services to. From there, His Love Foundation’s executive board chooses one of those three locations for its mission.
Every year, His Love Foundation services a different area of Guatemala. This year’s mission was from July 9-17 in San Marcos, Guatemala, and included 20 members of auxiliary staff, including all of Meaney’s team at Broadway Family Dental.
“We had 150-200 patients, but then also, aside from that, we also gave another 250 families food, and (this) week, we’re going to have 250 backpacks distributed to children,” Matul said.
Matul explained every family that came through got nonperishable foods like corn, rice and beans. The backpacks provided have school supplies ranging from notebooks to pens and were created through donations made by Lynn businesses and residents. The backpacks had a shipping delay, and Matul-Ramirez will be distributing them this week, as she is still in Guatemala.
This was Meaney’s third mission trip with His Love Foundation to Guatemala, and he emphasized the need for school supplies.
“Education is very important down there. People take advantage of all (services). For example, some of these people don’t even know what bacteria is. They don’t know the concept of disease, what causes problems, so we educate the population as best as we could,” he said.
Meaney added, “I guess in Guatemala, over half of the population speaks an indigenous language, so that’s what the school supplies are so important for. If you live in Guatemala, and you don’t speak Spanish, that’s a huge hindrance.”
Matul said the team needed to have a translator to translate Spanish to a dialect the people in San Marcos speak because they were all native.
Matul added the reason “why this trip was so important” was because “these families that got food, the kids that got dental treatment, they’re people who (will) never go to a dentist again or they cannot afford to get a dentist.”
He continued, “For example, one little boy that Dr. Meaney saw, he has four teeth that are either going to be (a problem) for the rest of his life, or they had to be pulled out. And obviously, there’s no health care in Guatemala. There’s no funding, so these families, they’re going to be struggling.”
Meaney said he and his team will be going back next year. He added that each trip is “equally gratifying.
“We live in a time where let’s just say the world is not a perfect place. I don’t know if it ever has been, but if I can do a little good in the world and make myself feel good, it’s a win-win for everybody – and I’m happy to do it,” Meaney said. “I’ve never met a group of people so grateful and so appreciative of what we’re doing.”
